Scalability Issues in Telecommunication Services

The development of the network technology is allowing the introduction of complex interactive services. The implementation of complex services available to millions of users on very large networks introduces strong scalability requirements, which are not addressed by today's technology. This paper describes some of the problems, and presents an overview of a possible solution, based on the use of mobile agents. A location service model and a partial implementation are presented, which scale to large number of clients and still allow a high rate of updates. The chosen application is a scalable audio on demand service. Audio servers are dynamically deployed in response to the degradation of quality of the audio received by the clients. In result, the service is able to adapt to overloaded servers and link congestion.