An Agent-based Approach to Service Management — Towards Service Independent Network Architecture

Abstract

With deregulation of the telecom industry the intense competition for customers is driving service providers to offer new and sophisticated services at an increasing rate. Simultaneously, the Internet is attracting vendor creativity and putting a fatal pressure on the traditional telecom pricing structure. Whereas the telecom industry still leads in service quality, there is growing need for a cost effective architecture for network and service management comparable in responsiveness and flexibility to the Internet, yet capable of maintaining high service quality for increasingly complex services. Although autonomous agents have been proposed for networks and distributed systems, they have largely been considered as reasoning entities exhibiting some form of intelligent behavior. Viewed more as autonomous objects, however, agents provide a powerful abstractions even when the agents task is more mundane in nature. In particular, the ability to move from one location to another goes beyond the strong level of modularity provided by object orientation, by disassociating each autonomous agent from a particular location or environment. In this paper we propose a new agent-based architecture for service management and provisioning. We describe an agent-based service environment and argue how such an environment supports rapid service creation and enables transparent services across authority domains.