An Agent Future for Network Control?

In an age of rapidly increasing network complexity and diversity, the idea of “bringing intelligence to the network” is becoming more of a necessity than “future work”. Since the early 1990’s, agent technology has often been proposed as a way of achieving this more effective, robust and above all autonomous network control. This article provides a brief tour of current trends in network development and discusses the potential for agent based solutions to some of the most pressing communications network problems.