Communications Systems Driven by Software Agent Technology Communications Systems Driven by Software Agent Technology

The application of software agent technology to the management of communications’ infrastructures is a challenging domain as it requires management on different time scales and has many interacting components. This paper looks at the potential benefits that may be gained from the application of agent technology to communications systems and surveys recent developments. Recent work using distributed network management by adopting co-operating and self-interested agent models of collaboration are described. The paper provides an introduction to the authors' perception of agent technology, followed by a discussion of some issues that need to be addressed for agent technology to be of practical use in the communications domain. Following sections describe how agent technology has been used for network management, legacy telecommunications systems, and telecommunications integration. The authors discuss how the emerging standards for agent technology can be used in an applied situation of providing a virtual private network. Latter sections describe mobile agent technology and some of the research that has adopted the mobile agent paradigm for fully distributed network control. Key Phrases: Network Management, Agent Technology, Intelligent Agents, Virtual Private Networks and Mobile Agents.