US 6,982,955 B1
Communications network
Ian W Marshall, Woodbridge (United Kingdom); and Christopher M Roadknight, Grundisburgh (United Kingdom)
Assigned to British Telecommunications public limited company, London (United Kingdom)
Filed on Mar. 28, 2000, as Appl. No. 9/537,229.
Int. Cl. H04J 3/14 (2006.01)
U.S. Cl. 370—230 28 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A multi-service communications network comprising:
a plurality of autonomously behaving nodes, each node being responsible for its own behavior,
each node comprising at least one nodal policy which determines which service requests are processed by each respective node,
wherein each of said plurality of autonomously behaving nodes being responsible for its own behavior performs:
acquiring one or more nodal policies to enable the node to process a request for a new service;
providing data enabling at least one other node in said communications network to behave autonomously to implement a nodal policy enabling each said at least one other node to process a request for the new service; and
optimizing its own local state using said at least one nodal policy; and
wherein each autonomously behaving node is responsible for its own behavior when acquiring a nodal policy by retrieving information from a policy pool which mutates a policy currently implemented by the node, the mutated policy enabling the node to process the request for the new service.