* Verizon and pals look to further work of IMS standard
Late last month, Verizon Wireless announced that it had created a task force with the “industry’s ‘best and brightest’ network engineers and strategists from Cisco, Lucent, Motorola, Nortel and Qualcomm.” The team was formed to further work by standards bodies on IP Multimedia Subsystem.
IMS is an architectural framework created to provide a standards-based approach to multimedia applications across multiple networks. The IMS standard relies principally on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to offer session control for these multimedia applications – the same protocol seen as the standard of choice for VoIP.
According to Verizon, the team has named its architectural approach “A-IMS – for Advances to IMS.”
In a statement, Dick Lynch, Verizon Wireless executive vice president and CTO said, “We applaud the visionaries who have done a great job developing IMS over the last few years. But as we approached implementation planning, it became apparent that there are some practical, real-world issues that need to be addressed if we are to transparently and completely deploy and maximize the use of this new architecture. To us, it is also important that it be built to support the bridging of the present non-IP reality as we transition to the future.”
The A-IMS approach focuses on several key architectural constructs including:
* Comprehensive security.
* Uniform treatment of SIP and non-SIP applications.
* Dual anchoring to provide a mobile terminal with two IP addresses so each address can be used more appropriately by different applications.
* Three-layer peering, used to better serve the peering requirements of roaming devices.
* Multi-tiered service interaction management, offering interaction between SIP and non-SIP applications.
* Bearer manager, used to better manage service quality.
* Policy manager.
* Application manager, the SIP services platform in the network.
* Security manager, responsible for monitoring and responding to security threats in real time.
* Services data manager, to manage subscriber and network control data, and billing data.
Our observations: 1. That a team of competitors has come together and quickly created real-life ways to hasten IMS development speaks to the potential value IMS holds. 2. This work was completed outside a “standard body,” which speaks to the slow process used to create standards and calls into question future standards body effectiveness in a rapidly changing technology ecosystem. 3 This new approach was created to serve the needs of one network operator (Verizon Wireless) and we’re not sure that A-IMS won’t be considered by other network providers as a “competing standard” to IMS. Hopefully, the potential value of real-life IMS (point No.1) will be a catalyst to address our concerns.
