A negotiating agents model for the provision of flexible telephony services

Current telephone systems suffer from a service interface bottleneck problem, wherein network resources are under utilised and customer requirements are often not met, in spite of these resources' ability to satisfy such requirements. This bottleneck is primarily due to a coarse grain service interface, coupled with the inability to support arbitrary terminal types, and the inability to interoperate with other systems. The paper outlines a new model for telephony services, based on the concept of negotiating agents. In this model, functionality is not made available to users in the form of services, as has been the case traditionally. Instead, users specify policies that describe how they wish their calls to be handled. These policies are used to guide agents appointed to act on behalf of users. The paper also describes a prototype that was built to demonstrate the capabilities of the model.