Dynamic VPN Provisioning through Communicative Agents

Due to the liberalisation of the telecom market, the capability of controlling complicated business processes has become more important than ever for deploying telecom services. Also, inter-operability between heterogeneous systems and networks has become a key issue. Furthermore, the need to cope with a variety of terminals, or to offer personalised services in a rapid way, are all becoming essential components of a successful business plan. Intelligent agents bring us an attractive way to solve many of those problems. Standardisation of Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) is however a first prerequisite of success. One of the most relevant standard bodies in this area is the Foundation for Intelligent and Physical Agents (FIPA). The European FACTS project has as primary objective to validate and contribute to FIPA via a number of application trials, including one in the domain of Virtual Private Network (VPN) provisioning. This paper will first describe the different types of agents and the VPN provisioning scenarios. The FIPA ACL specification has been used to implement those scenarios, but standardising only on an ACL is not sufficient. One should also agree on vocabularies used to describe services and user profiles. This paper will show the advantages of using content languages such as XML and RDF for service transactions and descriptions.