Market-Skilled Agents for Automating the Bandwidth Commerce

In the current deregulated Telecom scenario the number of network operators and service providers is rapidly increasing. The resulting competition generates the need for a exible resource management. In parallel, the fast growth of the electronic commerce opens a new market where operators can ooer`network bandwidth' commodities. In this dynamic context, the traditional architecture of Telecom networks needs to be evolved. For that purpose, the integration of economic principles with software technology is a strategic contribution to this evolution. In particular, market-skilled software agents seem to be one of the most promising paradigms. In this paper we describe an agent-based system for the e-commerce of IP-bandwidth, and we show how the integration of this system within a network management platform would automate the advertisement of goods, the monitoring of market trends, the pricing and the connguration of network resources. Abstract. In the current deregulated Telecom scenario the number of network operators and service providers is rapidly increasing. The resulting competition generates the need for a exible resource management. In parallel, the fast growth of the electronic commerce opens a new market where operators can ooer`network bandwidth' commodities. In this dynamic context, the traditional architecture of Telecom networks needs to be evolved. For that purpose, the integration of economic principles with software technology is a strategic contribution to this evolution. In particular, market-skilled software agents seem to be one of the most promising paradigms. In this paper we describe an agent-based system for the e-commerce of IP-bandwidth, and we show how the integration of this system within a network management platform would automate the advertisement of goods, the monitoring of market trends, the pricing and the connguration of network resources.