A unified framework for the negotiation and deployment of network services

The Internet network technology today does not allow a sufficient degree of autonomy to express user choices, constraints and preferences in order to dynamically obtain the most suitable services. One of the goals of Autonomic Communication is to produce self-managing network elements able to provide the desired services in an automated way. In this context, we propose an architecture to automate user-provider and provider-provider relationships, by converting the Internet into an electronic market space where the commodities to be traded are network services. After an agreement has been reached via agent-based automated negotiation mechanisms, network elements must be automatically configured in order to enforce the agreed conditions. This is achieved by generating commands to programmable network elements via open interfaces. The ultimate goal is enable fully automatic installation, configuration and monitoring of protocols or service components involving multiple ownership domains, while taking into account the constraints and preferences of users and providers.