Management of advanced services in H.323 Internet protocol telephony

The intelligent network (IN) represents the world-wide accepted basis for uniform provisioning of advanced telecommunication services. On the other hand IP-based communication is fast becoming a viable alternative for voice communications. 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 paper, a new service architecture for IP telephony, based on the ITU-T standard H.323, is proposed. The implementation uses mobile agents and Jini as enabling technologies and existing architectural concepts taken from IN. This IP service architecture enables telecommunication services deployed through mobile service agents on a per-user basis, which results in several advantages when compared to centralized service architectures. The paper demonstrates that the flexible extensible architecture can accommodate not only existing services but is flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of future services. In addition we show how the 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