IMS and ATCA: Brothers in arms

The IP multimedia subsystem and the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture might seem like similarly nebulous concepts to the uninitiated, but beyond their intimidating labels, IMS and ATCA are both just trying to help.

“They are both trying to solve the common problem of the industry's lack of standardization,” said Sanjeev Chawla, chief technology officer and executive vice president of engineering for BayPackets. “Having too much proprietary hardware and software out there makes it very hard for carriers to enhance their networks and IMS and ATCA both attack that problem.”

Those in the mobile industry likely are much more familiar with IMS, the 3GPP standard. The ATCA effort first began more than four years ago as a project of the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) and was designed as a standard for backplanes, boards, power distribution interfaces and other components used to build carrier-grade hardware. More than 100 companies were involved in the creation of this standard, according to the PICMG.

“The ATCA specification is pretty solid now,” said Sven Freudenfeld, director of business development for telecom at Kontron. “There is still work going on with making the standard easier to understand and implement, but you already see ATCA-based products being commercially available and deployed today.” He added that a microTCA standard addressing smaller equipment form factors is being developed.

Whereas ATCA focuses on the use of standardized components to create interoperable hardware, IMS is the broader standards framework that provides the interfaces between IP-based network components. “The IMS standard doesn't actually force products to be ATCA-based, but ATCA would certainly give carriers an additional level of confidence that those network elements would work together,” Chawla said. “Most IMS players would want it because it makes the ‘plug-ability’ happen.”

Market research firm IDC recently released a report saying that about 50% of the network equipment vendor community will adopt ATCA in parts of their product line by 2007. In addition, the report noted that there will be more than 900% growth in ATCA adoption with revenue increasing from $790 million in 2007 to $8.6 billion in 2011.

“Rates of ATCA adoption vary, with some companies adopting immediately and others waiting until the next wave of design wins in order to adopt more of these commercial off-the-shelf-based components for future telecom server products,” said Lee Doyle, group vice president of network infrastructure at IDC.

Still, ATCA faces a number of challenges to its widespread adoption, the report noted. “The technology needs to prove itself in terms of reliability, scalability and performance. The ATCA community needs to prove its products will adhere to standards and will be truly interoperable. ATCA board and chassis volumes need to ramp up to provide expected cost benefits.”