IMS finding new life with LTE
SEP 3, 2010 4:11 PM,
By Susana Schwartz
connectedplanetonline.com
New guideline documents from the NGN/IMS Forum can help to bridge older and newer environments so operators can manage hybrid 3G/4G strategies.
IP multimedia subsystem was said to be dead, but long-term evolution technology is bringing it back into the limelight, especially in all-IP environments. Yesterday’s announcement from the NGN/IMS Forum about its publishing guideline documents shows that IMS might have new life, driven in large part by the Diameter protocol.
As part of the IMS architecture, Diameter has become the de facto protocol for usage charging or policy management. Both are gaining momentum as more companies turn to policy management to help with intelligent decisions about users based on data hidden in far-flung operations/business support systems environments and as customer-centric fulfillment and charging are pursued.
As operators globally embrace LTE as the technology of choice for 4G networks and use IMS to support voice and other multimedia services, the forum’s guideline documents will help to bridge older and newer environments so operators can manage hybrid 3G/4G strategies.
The documents and the forum’s upcoming plugfests will enable interoperability and the integration of business functions to help operators monetize NGN services and improve the subscriber experience.
By addressing the main concepts that are involved in Diameter and how it fits into IMS architecture, the documents will help balance security requirements and the need for ease of use — two goals that are sometimes at odds with each other. As the equipment vendors increasingly use Diameter, there will be more interoperability as AAA functionalities are migrated from legacy to newer technologies. This could help drive adoption of next-generation IMS-based networks. (Diameter has been embraced by 3GPP and ETSI standard bodies as the foundation for AAA functionalities for next-generation networks based on IMS.)
The papers also address specific problems such as cross-release issues, contradictions and ambiguity in the specifications leading to different implementations, inconsistent rules and guidelines for defining new Diameter applications, backward incompatibility, version handling and so on.
The next NGN/IMS plugfest should be interesting now that these best practices and documents exist. Registration for the forum’s interoperability and testing working group is now open for any service providers, integrators and vendors that would like to participate (www.imsforum.org/Plugfest). |
