Abstract.With the magnificent expansion of network, both in the types of network elements and the software components to manage them, driven by the increasing requirement of different services, it is getting more imperative to seek a means to deploy the network management tasks and services in a fast, ubiquitous and automated way. Mobile agent technology (MAT) provides a promising means to achieve this goal with more flexibility and automation of managing network than those traditional client/server based distributed methods, such as CORBA. Mobile agents, as an enabling technology, can easily represent one of the roles involved in the network management; therefore have great potential to be widely used in network management. This paper proposes to use Policy-based Network Management (PBNM) as an application for MAT to facilitate network management products' development. PBNM, as a newly introduced but widely welcomed technology in the Internet world, can take over the overall management of hybrid network whereas MAT enables the flexible implementation of PBNM system. On the other hand, the agents usually have intelligence, which can be well guided by established policies from PBNM, which makes MAT and PBNM perfectly matched to each other. The work presented in this paper has been developed in the framework of the Europe Union (EU) sponsored IST Project MANTRIP. A commercially oriented testbed, which is fully based on mobile agent technology, has been set up, and a scenario for solving a practical network management challenge, i.e., interdomain IP Virtual Private Network, is implemented on this test-bed, which predicts a very promising commercial use of mobile agent in real world. Moreover, the policy-based network management system presented in this paper also covers some of the network management issues under investigation in the EU IST CONTEXT project. This policy and MAT based network management system intends to provide a ubiquitous network management system regardless of the underlying network resources, either wired network elements as the main scope of MANTRIP project or wireless network elements as the main stream of CONTEXT project.

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Considering context information, namely location, in order to create new services has become a commercial trend. The innovative approaches that context-aware mechanisms make possible are being targeted by service providers of diverse areas. On the other hand, Service Oriented Architectures play a central role in allowing component reuse and low cost service creation. Together with IP Multimedia Subsystem enable the convergence of telecommunications and web services, allowing the network transport technologies to be abstracted from the services above. By integrating these three technologies, a number of synergies can be explored. Existing services can be easily enriched with context information, made available on a variety of networks and new services can be composed using previously existing building blocks. This paper explains how this integration can be achieved, and demonstrates the potentialities of this architectural paradigm with a prototype service.

The increase of networking complexity requires the design of new performance optimization schemes for delivering different types of sessions to users under different conditions. In this regard, special attention is given to multi-homed environments, where mobile devices cross areas with overlapping access technologies (Wi-Fi, 3G, WiMax). In such a scenario, efficient multiparty delivery depends upon the grouping operation, which must be done based on several parameters. In this paper, the authors propose context-aware sub-grouping of content-based service groups so that the same service session can be delivered using different codings of the same content, adapting to current network, users, session, and environment context. The context-aware information is used to improve the sub-grouping process. This paper aims to describe these sub-grouping techniques, and in particular how they improve network performance and user experience in the future Internet by focusing on the improved network-level and session-level mechanisms.