An Agent-based Model for the Provision of Advanced Telecommunications Services

Modern stored program control (SPC) digital exchanges represent an opportunity to enhance traditional telecommunications services by offering subscribers finer control over the way their calls are managed. Thus far, the predominant approach (Intelligent Networks) has involved making highly specialised, well-defined functions available as services. These tend to exhibit a low degree of configurability and often interact with each other in undesirable ways (a phenomenon commonly known as feature interaction). This approach does not exploit the potential offered by SPC exchanges to the full, and cannot adequately deal with specific customer requirements. We propose an alternative approach whereby calls are managed by a number of co-operating agents acting on behalf of subscribers. In this model, subscribers have finer control over the functionality offered by the switch via their agents. The latter communicate amongst each other using a negotiation protocol which enables many kinds of feature interaction problems to be avoided. Our model considerably alters the traditional enterprise viewpoint and requires radically different approaches to marketing, deployment, evolution and tariffing of services. [To appear in `Proceedings of TINA '95, Melbourne, Australia.'']