| Future telecommunications services should be independent of: carrier, location, network, terminal, bandwidth, and application. This dissertation proposes an agent-based distributed call processing architecture to accomplish the goal. To demonstrate the capability of the architecture, a testbed has been built. In this testbed, users can communicate with each other by using their unique user IDs which are independent of different carriers (switching systems), service providers (call control agents), networks (IP and POTS), and terminals (PC and telephone). The architecture can also accommodate other networks, such as wireless PCS, ATM, and CATV. |