WIMAX and IMS

By Richard “Zippy” Grigonis
Sprint Nextel’s efforts to deploy WiMAX in the U.S., at one time rumored to be floundering, are now picking up some steam. Many people are still skeptical about WiMAX’s ultimate deployment on a large scale, but Yours Truly has put off purchasing a new EVDO Rev. A card, waiting patiently for mobile WiMAX to appear.

It was back in September 2005 when Alcatel announced it had demoed for the first time the delivery of IMS services using WiMAX radio access technology. The demo, held at Alcatel’s business offices in Vélizy, near Paris, France, used a whole range of Alcatel IMS solution components, supporting 3G/UMTS, DSL and WiMAX.

Recently, Huawei (News - Alert) Technologies Co., Ltd (www.huawei.com) has joined forces with the Warid Group, a mobile service provider in South Asia and Africa, to deploy IMS services. Huawei (News - Alert) will build the IMS core network and will add a WiMAX access network, thus allowing Warid customers to receive VoIP and IP-based multimedia services.

And in the Dominican Republic on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, Veraz Networks (News - Alert) (www.veraz.com), known for their IP softswitch and media gateway solutions, supplied the core technology that was used in the first IMS-over-mobile WiMAX (News - Alert) service in the Americas, launched by broadband wireless provider ONEMAX on October 24, 2007. Alcatel Lucent supplied technology for the radio access network.

Veraz’s IMS-over-WiMAX solution includes the Veraz User Services Core (USC), ControlSwitch and I-Gate 4000 series of media gateways. After Raoul Fontanez, Chief Executive Officer of ONEMAX, did the honors at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the network launch, the carrier proceeded to demonstrate WiMAX-enabled video telephony, high-definition streaming video, mobile broadband Internet access and VoIP services. Looking on was Amit Chawla, Vice President of Global Solutions and Engineering at Veraz Networks. Thanks to Veraz and Alcatel Lucent, ONEMAX now offers Internet, multimedia and VoIP services over mobile broadband.

Moreover, Veraz and Alvarion (News - Alert) (www.alvarion.com), a WiMAX and wireless broadband solutions provider, announced that they had completed interoperability testing in their efforts to deliver an IMS core solution capable of delivering multimedia services with end-to-end QoS over WiMAX networks. (Alvarion is a certified member of the Veraz Open Solutions Alliance.)

WiMAX chipsets have been developed by Beceem (News - Alert) (www.beceem.com) and Intel (News - Alert), and Runcom (www.runcom.co.il) had some of the first WiMAX chips and reference boards. Runcom’s Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA®) technology became the accepted standard IEEE (News - Alert) 802.16-2005 (formerly 802.16e, known to the rest of us as Mobile WiMAX). Aside from their components, channel cards, standalone units and reference designs for mobile WiMAX base stations, Runcom (News - Alert) has also done considerable work in fixed broadband wireless access services (802.16a) and the application of these wireless broadband technologies to the wireless interactive television (DVB-RCT) market.

In terms of software, the masters of VoIP protocol signaling stack code, TeleSoft International (News - Alert)
(www.telesoft-intl.com), offers IMS CompactSIP, a 3GPP/IMS-compliant WiMAX SIP software stack to hasten the development and interoperability testing of 3GPP and WiMAX handsets, 3G PDAs, datacards, telco/WoIP gateways, ATA/residential gateways, mobile platforms and chipsets. IMS CompactSIP supports the key 3GPP authentication and security standards plus the required IETF SIP RFCs. IMS CompactSIP is also available integrated and tested with the Interpeak IPNET TCP/IP networking stack as the IMS SIPNET product.

While some readers may wonder which tortoise is moving slower in this race – IMS or WiMAX – others realize that the fruition of both will ultimately lead to a remarkable synergy, befitting everyone.

Richard Grigonis is the Executive Editor of TMC (News - Alert)’s IP Communications Group.

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