GMI spotlights work to be done linking IMS, IPTV

WALTHAM, Mass. – The news from the Global MultiService Interoperability (GMI) test here wasn’t all positive, but it was all good.

Among other things, the two-week intensive testing involving four global carriers, 17 vendors and two national labs showed major work needs to be done on interfaces between IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) and extended components that support services such as IPTV. That’s the kind of less-than-positive result that GMI is intended to spotlight so that work can be accelerated.

“This puts a spin on a plugfest because we are moving further up the layer of enablers, and we bring everyone together to do it once so that we can make a major leap forward” in making standards truly interoperable, said Mark Wegleitner, senior vice president of technology at Verizon, which hosts the GMI events. “IMS is in a class by itself, and we need to do an event like this every few years on a global scale to advance the cause of IMS.”

The other carrier participants are BT and Vodafone in the UK, China Mobile, the federal government NCS Lab in Virginia and the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab. The 17 vendor participants at the Verizon site were Acme Packet, Alcatel-Lucent, Codenomicon, Empirix, Huawei Technologies, Ixia, JDSU, Mu Dynamics, NEC, Nortel Networks, Nokia-Siemens Networks, OSI, Spirent, Tektronicix, Telchemy and ZTE. Five other vendors, one of whom was Tekelec, participated at other sites. In addition, ATIS and the Multi-Service Forum were involved as well.

The intense two-week testing period ends tomorrow and has involved 225 devices running six physical test scenarios that include 80-plus test cases and 1000 individual tests, done by 125 test engineers, many of whom spend the two-week period in one room within the Verizon labs at Waltham.

The six test scenarios included two that addressed end-to-end session control with quality of service, for a variety of broadband access technologies, including baseband, broadband, 3GPP, 3GPP2, WiMAX and TDSCDMA over a converged core network. Two others addressed IPTV and were done in conjunction with ATIS and its IPTV Interoperability Forum, looking at validating the automatic configuration of set-top boxes and at management issues such as collecting IPTV-related statistics automatically. The other two looked at location-based services and at service-oriented architecture and Web-based services.