Mobile agent and CORBA technologies in the broadband intelligent network

This article presents an IN architecture that is based on distributed objec t and mobile agent technologies. It deviates from traditional IN in two pro minent ways: First, by substituting message-based protocols with a CORBA di stributed processing environment. The new communications infrastructure not only serves to convey IN flows, but also functions as a potent unifying lo cation-transparent layer. Second, the new architecture makes heavy use of m obile agent technology. Service logic programs are implemented as mobile ag ents, and are thus not constrained to control the switch's operations remot ely from a central location. Instead, they can migrate and control its oper ations locally. The infrastructure elements of the architecture exploit thi s ability of service logic programs by cloning them and dragging their clon es to the appropriate locations in response to excess professing or signali ng load. The architecture is in this way self-balancing, in contrast to the centralized nature of traditional IN. A prototype implementation is presen ted along with a service creation framework that enables the IN service des igner to disregard environment-related issues and concentrate on the IN log ic of the services per se.