ASPOSE: Agent-Based Service Provisioning in Open Services Environment

Abstract

Intense competition in telecommunication industry together with ever-increasing user requirements is changing service provisioning pattern in recent years. It is conceivable that future telecommunication services will be offered by service providers over network infrastructure owned by independent network providers. Consequently, service providers and network providers must cooperate to satisfy the user requirements, such as provision of personalized services across network and terminal boundaries with the same look and feel. To satisfy those requirements, an open service provisioning framework that facilitates seamless service provisioning across multi-domain networks is needed. In this paper, we propose such a service provisioning framework which is called ASPOSE (Agent-based Service Provisioning in Open Services Environment). We describe the framework in detail ranging from user terminal registration, service deployment to service execution. In the system implementation aspect, we apply an iterative design process in which TINA (Telecommunication Information Networking Architecture) is adopted as the system modeling template and UML (Unified Modeling Language) as the description language.