Policies: Giving users control over calls

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 discusses an architecture to allow for policy definition and call control by policies and describes the operation of a system based on this architecture. One aspect is policy definition, the APPEL policy description language that serves this purpose. An important aspect of the architecture is integral feature interaction handling. It is in this last aspect that we foresee a role for agents, and hope that this paper will stimulate some collaboration between the two mostly distinct research areas of feature interaction and agent technologies.