Agent based interperability in telecommunications applications

The evolution of the telecommunications technology and market also calls for the evolution of the software design paradigms for the open distributed systems. Especially new frameworks for enhanced interoperability support among telecommunication application resources are required in this context, which should be based on a higher degree of understandings among the distributed systems Traditional approaches for interoperability, such as RPC or DOT, are based on relatively syntactical understandings by pre-specified/agreed, or dynamically exchanged syntaxes of the co-operation interfaces, and rely on relatively static co-operations functionalities. Such a static nature can not meet the requirements of the dynamic, heterogeneous, distributed and mobile telecommunications environments. Among others, such traditional technologies do not support the dynamic and smooth adaptation of the co-operation functionality following the evolution of the business or technological requirements, limit the possibility of offering individually tailored services to the customers and users, and do not offer sufficient support for reliable and robust co-operations within a widely distributed or even nomadic application environment. To overcome such shortcomings of the traditional paradigms for distributed software design, one level of enhanced interoperability will be needed, which will be based on the knowledgebased understanding among the co-operating systems. Knowledge-based understanding in this context means the capability of the co-operating systems to exchange and interpret the knowledge about the expected behaviors associated to the data or data schemes that are conveyed by the interaction messages between the systems. Agent technology can be considered here as the new software design paradigm which supports such knowledge-based interoperability among autonomous distributed applications or application environments. The main objective of this thesis is to develop an agent-based solution for enabling and utilizing knowledge-based interoperability among telecommunications service applications. As the main features, this solutions will be based on the agent framework and architecture which – integrate the standard conform technologies for both speech act based agent intelligence and agent mobility, based on the FIPA and OMG MASIF standardisation, – adopt an object, rule and Web-oriented knowledge representation and management framework which support enhanced reusability, accumulative construction and dynamic adaptation of the agent co-operation intelligence, – define an agent template that implements the elementary rational and social behaviors of an agent in the provisioning and management of telecommunications services, and use such an agent template to support the flexible, adaptive co-operations among autonomous and heterogeneous applications. For validating the solution, the new approach is applied to a dynamic VPN service application scenario, where agent-based interoperability can help to enable the dynamic customization and adaptation of services, and also to enhance reliability, robustness of service co-operations.