| Abstract: | This article presents an IN architecture that is based on distributed object and mobile agent technologies. It deviates from traditional IN in two prominent ways: first, by substituting message-based protocols with a CORBA distributed processing environment. The new communications infrastructure not only serves to convey IN flows, but also functions as a potent unifying location-transparent layer. Second, the new architecture makes heavy use of mobile agent technology. Service logic programs are implemented as mobile agents, and are thus not constrained to control the switch's operations remotely from a central location. Instead, they can migrate and control its operations locally. The infrastructure elements of the architecture exploit this ability of service logic programs by cloning them and dragging their clones to the appropriate locations in response to excess processing or signaling load. The architecture is in this way self-balancing, in contrast to the centralized nature of traditional IN. A prototype implementation is presented along with a service creation framework that enables the IN service designer to disregard environment-related issues and concentrate on the IN logic of the services per se |
