Services, LTE help renew IMS push

As vendors and service providers prepare for next month’s SUPERCOMM show in Chicago, discussions on the topic of IP multimedia subsystem and next-generation networks are focused on steady growth, despite the downturn, as well as on leveraging the IP software architecture for more than just voice services.

Early IMS deployments have been largely focused on supporting voice-over-IP (VoIP) services and duplicating existing voice network functionality. It’s for that reason, perhaps more than any other, that IMS uptake has been relatively slow. There just hasn’t been a sense of urgency, or the available capex, to move the network back to where it already started.

That appears to be changing, IMS vendors say, as new service requirements — particularly those enabled by the Rich Communications Suite (RCS) specifications — and new wireless architectures — most notably long-term evolution (LTE) — are driving new, more urgent requirements to move to IMS-style software architectures in the core of the network.

“Despite the economic climate, we’re continuing to see traction and growth with IMS pretty much on a worldwide basis,” said Jonathan Zarkower, director of product marketing for Acme Packet. “It’s still not exploding, but we’re seeing continued uptake with a series of new projects and applications.”

One of particular interest is in using IMS architectures to support the Rich Communications Suite (RCS) specifications, which define network-delivered advanced services such as mobile instant messaging, presence and more. RCS offers a way for mobile operators in particular to compete in the mobile apps game.

“It’s a competitive battleground — Apple with the App Store and other approaches that drive the mobile application down to the device,” Zarkower said. “Mobile operators are looking to leverage their IMS infrastructure as a way to compete. Over time, that IMS core can be used to build really nice services that can keep them extremely competitive and allow them to control the quality of service, as well.”

One of the more notable IMS developments at SUPERCOMM will be a discussion of results from the latest IMS/NGN Plugfest event, which will be held Oct. 5–9, a couple of weeks before the show. The group will be ready to talk about preliminary results from the interoperability event at SUPERCOMM and voted just this week to open up its board and working group meetings, which will be held at the show, to anyone attending the event, said Michael Khalilian, chairman and president of the IMS/NGN Forum. “We’re thinking of it like a ‘think tank’ meeting,” he said.

Plugfest 8 will focus on testing for interoperability for roaming and visiting subscribers, with IMS/NGN services to be tested to include VoIP, IPTV, presence, security and operation/business systems support. In recent Plugfests, the focus has moved from testing basic protocol interoperability to testing how services perform across multivendor IMS networks. In addition, Plugfest 8 will focus on government requirements for IMS networks for the first time, Khalilian said.

“NGN is the convergence and transition point for any operator making a move from traditional network elements to IP,” Khalilian said. “All service providers globally are making this transition. The next step is they need an enhanced architecture to support NGN. They need IMS.”

Test vendor Mu Dynamics has been an active participant in the Plugfests and has a new release of their core test platform slated for early October — and demonstrated at SUPERCOMM — that among other new developments will allow users to leverage test data and results from the Plugfest events to help their own networks — a sort of “Plugfest in a box,” said Thomas Maufer, director of technical marketing for Mu Dynamics.

Network equipment providers will also focus on IMS/NGN and new service delivery at the show. Alcatel-Lucent, for instance, released its IMS 8.1 product this summer and is slated to make IMS 8.2 available in November with a focus on using IMS to deliver RCS-based services, said Rich Crowe, director of product marketing for Alcatel-Lucent’s wireline networks products division. “We’ve done all the testfests and related work, and we believe we’ve got a fully compliant [RCS] product, nicely packaged as a solution for our customers. We’re seeing RCS gaining traction, particularly in Europe,” Crowe said, adding that mobile is also starting to pick up as an IMS driver, as customers think about LTE and plan their road maps to layer apps on top of this new wireless infrastructure.

While not specific to IMS, Ericsson will have a major focus on service delivery at SUPERCOMM, with a specific focus on for the first time providing operators with pre-packaged solutions to help them more rapidly deliver new service capabilities, said Arpit Joshipura, vice president of marketing and strategy for Ericsson. Among the solutions Ericsson will be rolling out at SUPERCOMM include IPTV, converged backhaul, converged network gateway and services convergence, Joshipura said.

“As an industry, fixed operators are not used to getting solutions from their vendors; they are used to getting products and then spending six or nine months figuring out what to do with them,” he said.  “We believe if we can give them a pre-tested, interoperable solution on day 1, not just with Ericsson products but from multiple other vendors as well, we can make life easier for them.”