An Agent-based Approach to Service Management - Towards Service Independent Network Architecture

With deregulation of the telecom industry the intense competition for customers is driving service providers to offer new and sophisticated services at an increasing rate. Simultaneously, the Internet is attracting vendor creativity and putting a fatal pressure on the traditional telecom pricing structure. Whereas the telecom industry still leads in service quality, there is growing need for a cost effective architecture for network and service management comparable in responsiveness and flexibility to the Internet, yet capable of maintaining high service quality for increasingly complex services.