Service portability in UMTS

It is a well established principle in ETSI that the approach to the standardisation of services for UMTS will be to provide a set of tools with which operators, service providers and value added service providers can build their own proprietary services. While this can overcome the restrictions of the traditional approach to services it implies a new level of complexity to ensure that users can obtain the services they need from any access point. This means that both fixed and mobile networks need to provide the capabilities to enable a user to obtain their services even when those services have been created by someone other than the serving network. One approach to providing this level of flexibility is to use agent technology as the means to transport between networks, the intelligence necessary to run a service. This article gives an overview the issues involved in service portability and provides some details of the scope of a collaborative research project called Cameleon examines the suitability of software agents for use in UMTS