Patent ID: 6982955

Claim:
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.