User Cooperation and Search in Intelligent Networks ⋆ Erol Gelenbe Dennis Gabor Chair, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London SW7 2BT e.gelenbe@imperial.ac.uk Abstract. We present a vision of an Intelligent Network in which users dynamically indicate their requests for services, and formulate needs in terms of Quality of Service (QoS), duration, and pricing. Users can also monitor on-line the extent to which their requests are being satisfied. In turn, services will dynamically try to satisfy the users as best as they can, and inform the user of the level at which the requests are being satisfied, and at what cost. The network will provide guidelines and constraints to users and services, to avoid that they impede each others’ progress. This intelligent and sensible dialogue between users, services and the network can proceed constantly based on mutual observation, network and user self-observation, and on-line adaptive and distributed feedback control which proceeds at the same speed as changes in traffic flows and the events occurring in the network. We survey some of the technical problems that arise in such networks, illustrate the networked system we propose via an experimental test-bed based on the Cognitive Packet Network (CPN), and discuss the key issue of search for users and services. Keywords: Network Intelligence, Autonomic Networks, Users and Services, User Goals and Quality of Service, Cognitive Packet Networks. 1 Introduction Sheer technological capabilities and intelligence, on their own, are of limited value if they do not lead to enhanced and cost-effective capabilities that are of value to human – or even beyond humans – to living users. Fixed and then mobile telephony and the Internet have been enablers for major new develop- ments that improve human existence. However advances in telecommunications have also had some undesirable and unexpected outcomes during the past cen- tury. A case in point is television broadcasting. It was initially thought that television broadcasting would become a wonderful medium for education. Un- fortunately in many instances it has lowered public expectations with regard to the quality of entertainment by limiting the range of programs and content that ⋆ Research supported by UK EPSRC under Grant GR/S52360/01 and by the EU FP6 Marie Curie Programme under project MIRG-CT-2004-506602. I. Stavrakakis and M. Smirnov (Eds.): WAC 2005, LNCS 3854, pp. 41–56, 2006. The original version of this chapter was revised: The copyright line was incorrect.This has been corrected. The Erratum to this chapter is available at DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-32993-0 29 © 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg