Is there light at the end of the IMS tunnel ?
I joined a panel to discuss IMS approaches to deliver rich communications. These days, the industry has become skeptical of telecom standardization’s ability to support cool services, especially with the competing wave of web and device innovations. But our moderator Stephane Teral, from Infonetics Research compared 2011 market of 8B$ VoIP infrastructure (migration of PSTN to VoIP is becoming mainstream) and 1B$ on IMS, (a significant ramp-up). I commented that perhaps it’s unfair to compare IMS and web 2.0 because the requirements have changed since the original specifications to connect voice devices and not to connect people with services.
But what if we were asked to develop IMS 2.0 today using the best of IT architectures ?I think we would certainly come up with an open user profile, such as HSS GUP and content streaming control. I gave the example that HP OpenCall's IMS/HSS developments for user profiling can be extended to enhance group communications with a web 2.0 flavor. Also on the panel, Dan Bantukul from Tekelek explained that IMS is not about killer services but a framework for deploying IP services independently from media, network access and transport. It should be an incremental evolution rather than a greenfield deployment. He stressed the pivotal role of session management (CSCF) and SIP Proxy (RFC 3261) . Another panelist, Adam Stein, from MuDynamics talked about roll-out processes and avoiding problems and pain points before they occur. He mentioned the complex and symbiotic behavior of the many (>20 software and hardware) IMS components and methodology necessary to test the system as a whole. End to end testing and QoS validation is a necessary ingredient to any standard-based multi-vendor and distributed deployment.
Can IMS support visual experiences on consumer devices ?
I said yes, but enhancements are required on IMS/MRF (such as HP's OCMP) to support video streaming and trans-coding across mobile, PC and IPTV. It’s more about content adaptation and visual interaction. This triggered questions from the audience on session support across multiple home appliances such as IPTV and phones. I wished I was more familiar with the work of Oliver Friedrich, et al, at Fraunhofer FOKUS who have published about their IPTV IMS client implementation at IEEE NOMS 2008 and illustrated here. The user experience include See-what-I-see to enables buddies to switch to the channel I am watching, caller-ID-on-TV and VoD stream paused during calls. I referenced other pre-IMS and IMS case studies in Germany showing the convergence with soft phones (Vodafone's IP Phone Pro), handsets (Visual mailbox) and web mashup (Fraunhoffer Fokus OpenIMS project).
