A Policy Architecture for Enhancing and Controlling Features

Features provide extensions to a basic service, but in new systems users require much greater flexibility oriented towards their needs. Traditional features do not easily allow for this. We propose policies as the features of the future. Policies can be defined by the end-user, and allow for the use of rich context information when controlling calls. This paper introduces an architecture for policy definition and call control by policies.We discuss the operation of systems based on such an architecture. An important aspect of the architecture is integral feature interaction handling.