Mobile service agents enabling “intelligence on demand” in telecommunications

Today many countries are aiming for the establishment of national information infrastructures in order to satisfy the emerging needs of the upcoming information society. This infrastructure should provide the foundation of an “electronic marketplace”, where information services and telecommunication services will be offered by competitive service providers to arbitrary customers. The rapid and customized provision of services, which we call “intelligence on demand” represents an important prerequisite for the realization of a dynamic market place. In this context the concept of “mobile service agents” offers a new paradigm for the rapid and customized provision of services in open distributed processing environments. We illustrate the differences between telecommunication services based on the traditional, i.e. RPC-based client/server paradigm, and service implementations based on mobile service agents. We also discuss architectural principles and requirements of a distributed agent environment supporting mobile service agents. To show the benefits of mobile agent technology and specifically its application for the realization of mobile service agents, the paper addresses the impact of the mobile service agent concept on existing and upcoming telecommunication architectures such as IN, TMN and TINA