New Concept Platforms for QoS Management in Future Telecommunication Scenarios

In this paper the concept of ‘‘Situation&Location’’ based platforms for QoS management in next-generation heterogeneous telecommunication scenarios is presented. The exploitation of a Multi-Agent System is investigated with the aim of providing a user with seamless and optimized network access to the desired service based on its current situation and location. Key feature of the proposed system is the presence of a middleware platform exploiting user profile-, resource-, and situation-management agents whose ontology is specified in XML language. The proposed platform is intended as a sample architecture for QoS control and adaptation. It tries to contribute to the research activities that several forums, interest groups, and standardization bodies are conducting in the view of 4G system full deployment.