[August 9, 2001]

Multiservice Switching Forum Announces Progress Towards Open Architecture Network Solutions

The Multiservice Switching Forum (MSF) announced that it has made significant technical progress in its drive towards open architecture multi-service, multi-technology, multi-vendor next generation network solutions.

At the July 31-August 2 technical committee meeting in Boston, MSF working groups advanced three implementation agreements (IA) to straw ballot emphasizing the Forum's commitment to address both ATM and IP environments. The first of these IAs is a profile of the SIP-T protocol between controllers. The second IA is a MEGACO/H.248 profile for an IP trunking gateway. The third is an ATM-oriented IA that creates an MSF profile of the Bearer Independent Call Control (BICC) which was originally developed by the ITU. Together, these IAs represents the industry's first significant attempt to achieve interoperability in a multi-vendor environment.

"This may have been the most productive meeting that MSF has ever had," said Roger Ward, MSF president. "In Boston, we made substantial strides in our drive towards open architecture, multi-service, multi-technology, multi-vendor solutions for next generation communication systems. In the network environment of the future the industry needs to embrace a multi-service solution that will address both IP and ATM technology and the MSF is helping to drive that solution."

In other developments at the Boston meeting, MSF's Architecture Working Group announced compatibility with the 3G wireless environment through further development of the MSF Release 2 Functional Architecture Framework. As future investments in the industry are increasingly targeted toward mobility and wireless environments, the MSF Architecture Working Group will continue to work to ensure its solutions are appropriate in this important context.

"The industry cannot afford to address only fixed line access as the world goes mobile," said Mark Klerer. "The MSF is working to ensure that its Architectural Framework is appropriate to all next generation access environments which of course must include 3G wireless."

The Architecture Working Group also made progress on developing the Application Plane Architecture that will allow new features and services to be added quickly and efficiently in an MSF networked environment.

The MSF's Physical Architecture Scenario Task Force, created at the Forum's May 2001 meeting, made a preliminary identification of seven scenarios to be used for end-to-end interoperability trials. These scenarios are designed to prove that interoperability can be maintained in an open commercially realistic environment. The Scenario Task Force has identified both data and voice scenarios. The task force will identify the necessary services, features and protocol profiles that need to be in place in order to drive to interoperability.

"It is important to give vendors the opportunity to build the pieces of a multiservice network and to show that vendors can commercially deploy these networks in the marketplace," said Mark Disbrow, technical committee vice chairman. "The MSF is working to shape appropriate commercially viable end-to-end scenarios for interoperability testing. These new test scenarios will take us beyond the current state of individual profile testing and are an important step towards our vision of open next generation multi-vendor solutions."

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]