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Dec. 2, 2008

Overall, wireless service providers and mobile vendors that support IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystems) are making some kind of progress on interoperability issues.

However, there's still plenty of work to do next year, leaders of the IMS Forum said in their latest self-issued IMS Report Card yesterday.

IMS technology has been promoted now for several years but is still moving rather slowly, and its adoption rate isn't what it was expected when IMS was developed more than six years ago.

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is an architectural framework for delivering internet protocol multimedia services. It was originally designed by the wireless standards body 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) as part of the vision for evolving mobile networks beyond GSM.

Its original formulation (3GPP R5) represented an approach to delivering Internet services over GPRS. This vision was later updated by 3GPP, 3GPP2 and TISPAN by requiring support of networks other than GPRS, such as Wireless LAN, CDMA2000 and fixed line.

To ease the integration with the Internet, IMS uses IETF protocols wherever possible. According to the 3GPP, IMS isn't intended to standardize applications but rather to aid the access of multimedia and voice applications from wireless and wireline terminals.

This is done by having a horizontal control layer that isolates the access network from the service layer. Services need not have their own control functions, as the control layer is a common horizontal layer.

“Although an all-IP platform at first may appear more complicated, IP networks make it easier to create, add, manage, bill for, and modify multiple services across various platforms and access technologies.

As was the case with the Internet and VoIP, IMS is evolving and maturing beyond its early hype and is now in the process of being deployed in various forms in wireless carrier networks around the world,” forum officials wrote.

There are 50 such tests occurring worldwide, they said. “Despite the lack of consensus, most mobile service providers have begun either exploring or deploying IMS architectures of various stripes in staging as well as working networks.

Objections to the IMS architecture on the grounds of its lack of interoperability, its immaturity, or its complexity are no longer tenable,” officials assert. For next year, IMS technologies that need work include IMS client software, IPTV, FMC and service level traffic variations, they said.

It’s possible that IMS-like architectures may naturally evolve but be called something else.

“You can change the name, but you need the basic framework. If you talk to Verizon and then if you talk to Comcast, you’re going to get a very different definition,” forum Chairman Michael Khalilian said.

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Source: The IMS Forum.