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Dont Miss the Bus!

IPCC-International Packet Communications Consortium

IPCC Feature Article

March 02, 2006

Dont Miss the Bus!

Robert Liu, Executive Editor


 
As end-users get a taste for the kinds of always-on, always-available interactive applications enabled by IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS), network operators and service providers will likely be left scrambling to find the suite of services that are best tailored to the needs of their subscribers.
 
While those needs will vary as greatly as the demographic and personal/professional preferences of the subscription base itself, there are certainly measures that carriers can take now to ensure that system performance will be optimized to meet different throughput needs, whatever they may be.
 
The main value proposition of IMS lies in the separation of session controls from their underlying service. For the first time, this separation enables service providers of all types to adapt the so-called "Walled Garden" business model of mobile operators to the realm of IP services. That is a huge boon to the feature-rich IP ecosystem, opening the door for information technology professionals that have spent years perfecting their wares.
 
“The separation of the services layer from the session control layer gives the IT world a strong hand in what had been exclusively a telecom domain,” wrote Rebecca Copeland, analyst at Core Viewpoint, in a report published by Moriana Group.
 
As such, carriers and service providers have been able to switch out of expensive proprietary architecture over to general-computing platforms, especially since the development of key standards such as the AdvancedTCA form factor in 2001. And that trend is only likely to accelerate as service providers begin building in IMS-compliant components such as the Home Subscriber Service (HSS) to control user data.
 
Because HSS is more than simply a database used for authentication, service providers have an opportunity to unify customer data that was formerly protected (and to some degree, isolated) into a central control element for service selection. Using a modular framework, HSS unleashes the ability to manage user policies, map user locations and establish registration information, access parameters and service-triggering data in a way that can be neatly tied to the back-office OSS/BSS system for billing and customer care. And to date many companies like Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert), Apertio and other HSS vendors have preached a similar sermon.
 
But as stated above, managing those tasks would be infinitely easier if the carrier or service provider knew, for instance, that voice will only be used during the subscribers base’s normal business hours or that video would mainly be viewed after hours and on weekends. So without a crystal ball, service providers must rely on other measures to operate an IMS network efficiently.
 
“When you want to have multiple customers or different applications leveraging the same set of media server ports, they all assume they are going to get [dedicated] media server ports. In actuality, they don't all use ports at the same time – you don't want to overprovision,” explained Jon Allingham, IT Director at Leapstone Systems.
 
Leapstone’s Communications Convergence Engine is especially designed to work with home subscriber servers, no matter if it’s the HP OpenCall or the Aperio One platform. Leapstone’s serviceBROKER solution provides various IMS functions like Serving-Call Session Control (S-CSCF), Service Capability Interaction Manager (SCIM), subscriber service profile generation and dynamic registration of profiles.
 
“They are more of a messaging integration framework. We are more of an IMS service integration,” said Akshay Goel, Director of Business Development at Leapstone.
 
“If you use the Leapstone product, applications can share the same media server but it's easier to manage,” Allingham added. “Some cases you can save 20 percent of your media server ports by using resource management across different applications.”
 
Of course, if you do have a crystal ball, the savings won’t seem as significant and you probably won’t need to worry about this sort of stuff.
 
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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.

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