Mobile agent-based advanced service architecture for H.323 Internet protocol telephony

Internet Protocol (IP) based communication is fast becoming a viable alternative for voice communications. While the Intelligent Network (IN) represents the world wide accepted basis for the uniform provision of advanced telecom services, mobile agents offer unique opportunities for structuring and implementing open distributed service architectures, facilitated by the dynamic downloading and movement of service code to specific network nodes. In this thesis, a new service architecture for ITU-T standard H.323 based IP Telephony is proposed. The new service architecture uses Mobile Agents and Jini as enabling technologies. It also makes use of the existing architectural concepts of IN. This IP service architecture enables telecom services being deployed through mobile service agents on a per user basis, which results in several advantages when compared to centralized service architectures. The thesis demonstrates that the proposed service architecture not only can accommodate existing services but is flexible and extensible enough to accommodate a wide variety of future services. In addition, it is shown that the new architecture addresses the full management life-cycle of advanced services, from open third party creation to subscription and utilization, and ultimately to maintenance and withdrawal.