Agent technology in communications systems: an overview

Abstract

Telecommunications infrastructures are a natural application domain for the distributed software agent paradigm. The authors clarify the potential application of software agent technology in legacy and future communications systems, and provide an overview of publicly available research on software agents used for communications management. The authors focus on the intelligent agent type of software agent, although the paper also reviews the reasons why mobile agents have made an impact in this domain. The author's objective is to describe some of the intricacies of using the software agent approach for the management of communications systems. The paper is in four main sections. The first section provides a brief introduction to software agent technology. The second section considers general problems of network management and the reasons why software agents may provide a suitable solution. The third section reviews some selected research on agents in a telecommunications management framework. The final section concludes the paper by discussing some of the problems encountered and some future directions for further research.

Suitability assessment framework of agent-based software architectures

“…Hence, we add a cross validation step in this section. The resultant features are cross checked to ensure they cover criteria described by [25,29,37,51,54,55,73] from the related work section (Section II). Our intention throughout the work is to ensure that the framework is usable by software developers who do not necessarily know a great deal about agent technology.…”

“…Our features address most criteria described by [25,29,37,51,54,55,73], with the exception of a few excluded for either of two reasons: First, some are excluded as they are subsumed by one or a combination of our suggested features. For example, our feature set does not include 'complexity' which in [37] refers to problems being too large for centralized solutions. Using our features set this can be said to require a high degree of distribution.…”

“…It secondly constructs a framework which assesses the suitability of a MAS solution, given a set of problem related features. Whilst our feature identification may be biased by the chosen examples and the way each problem was originally framed, resultant features actually generalise (and address) all criteria described by [25,29,37,51,54,55,73]. Since it is the intention that the framework can be applied by software engineers who may not be experts in AOSE, the features included in our framework are determined from the problem itself and not the properties of the resulting solution.…”

“…Whilst the analysis was convincingly thorough in those problem domains considered by [37,54,55], no domain-independent validations or generalizations were made. We believe that it has been briefly attempted only in AOSE in the context of creating new methodologies.…”

“…cases presented in Table 5 later in this paper), none have demonstrated an analysis of suitability at the same level of depth of [37,54,55]. One of the earliest reviews of MAS suitability and general benefits can be found in [37].…”