IMS A Year-End Review and Prognostications

By Richard “Zippy” Grigonis
RadiSys Corporation (www.radisys.com) provides advanced solutions for communications networking and commercial systems, built with such advanced technologies as AdvancedTCA, MicroTCA (News - Alert) and COM Express.

Peter Briscoe, the Executive Vice President and General Manager of RadiSys Canada, says, “My view is that IMS is an extremely important architecture for the service providers to allow them to compete in this new world of Internet-style telecommunications. In other words, they’ve got to come up with a way to allow services and applications to be tried out, succeed or fail, and then the successful ones are quickly ramped up. In order to do that, considering providers typically have a very large customer base they have to deal with, they have to come up with a structure that allows that to happen but also allows them to maintain the quality and the customer experience and all of the good things that we expect out of a communications system. So while they’ve got to be able to react as fast as the Internet, they can’t afford to be low-quality. It’s a tough situation in which they find themselves. I think all of the telecom vendors have put their heads together along with the standards people and the architects and have asked themselves, ‘How can we give the providers a way to compete that still maintains the kind of high quality we’re all familiar with, so people just don’t try the service, hang up, and never use it again’. I think that’s what IMS is all about.”

“One of the keys is services,” says Briscoe. “The problem is that nobody has yet come up with new services that are really ‘home runs’. But they will appear, because as we move into the IMS era, we’re starting to get into multimedia, video and those are things that will differentiate new services completely from the old services that we created in the past.”

“Another key to IMS success is the ability for third parties to create applications and services and try them out on the IMS platform,” says Briscoe. “There are things in place to allow that to happen, but I still think it’s very early in this whole process. In the past year, we’ve seen a lot of lab activity, we’ve seen some tries at some new things, but mostly what we’ve seen is marketing. It’s mostly determining ‘what sticks’. I don’t think we’ve seen a home run yet.”

“Because IMS is linked fairly heavily to convergence of the wireline and wireless worlds,” says Briscoe, “and with 3G just coming on and really getting going, the whole system is coming together to a critical mass. A wise telecom person once told me, ‘It always takes us longer to get somewhere than we all had hoped, but when it finally happens, it seems to occur faster than all of us can believe’. So I think we’re still in the initial ‘longer-than-expected’ phase.

“RadiSys (News - Alert) is involved with many trials and lab activities around the world,” says Briscoe, “but there are only a few providers that have actually converted and are providing full-time service. IMS has so many ‘moving pieces’ it’s a complex beast to get going when there aren’t ‘home run’ applications to send over it. So, I think many companies perhaps have decided that they’re going to try some new applications independently of IMS, and if they succeed, they’ll quickly move them onto IMS as a catalyst to drive it forward.”

“For 2008, one of the places that I see a lot of potential is China,” says Briscoe. “The 3G licenses there have dragged on and on and nothing has happened. But I believe they will be awarded this year. That will help catalyze some new applications onto IMS. That won’t drive the volume, but it will be a catalyst to get some new things going.”

“All over the world we’re involved with many video and multimedia applications and services,” says Briscoe. “We’re exploring them with customers and service providers. That’s the phase we’re in right now. In 2008 things should move further along and hopefully we’ll find some new things. Indeed, I’m already seeing some new things hatched and launched. Hopefully the pick-up volume will drive the whole of IMS forward.”

Slow But Sure

Dialogic (News - Alert) Corporation announced in October 2007 that it had acquired all outstanding shares of EAS Group, subsidiaries of which include Cantata Technology, Inc. (www.cantata.com), itself consisting of Excel Switching Corporation, Brooktrout (News - Alert) Technology and SnowShore Networks. Just around the time Dialogic announced the deal, Yours Truly was speaking with industry legend James Rafferty, Director of Media Gateway (News - Alert) Product Management at Cantata.

“Certainly at Cantata one of the things that we’ve observed is that The Year of IMS is starting to look like what happened with The Year of the LAN,” says Rafferty. “In other words, nobody’s really sure when it will happen. But the good news is that the components that make up what people are doing with IMS – typically use of SIP, SIP with markup languages – those are coming along just fine. We see strong adoption of SIP. We offer both SIP and H.323 on the IP side, and I must admit that for every conversation we have about H.323 there’s 10 to 15 concerning SIP. So SIP is moving along like gangbusters.”

“On the standards side, this past year has seen some movement in media server controllers and the Media Resource Function [MRF] in that the IETF finally sanctioned a working group to deal with this called Media Control, which is in the process of doing things like frameworks and requirements documents for media control,” says Rafferty. “The expected outcome is that some sort of XML-based protocol will come out of that as well. So this Media Control Working Group has gotten some pretty wide participation.”

“In a similar regard, the CT1 Working Group of 3GPP is basically studying the same topic in its Release 8,” says Rafferty. “Release 7 came out this past year. The piece in which I was involved has been the interface between an Application Server [AS], the CSCF and then going down to the top component of the MRF which would be the MRFC [Media Resource Function Controller] rather than the MRFP [Media Resource Function Processor (News - Alert)].”

“There continues to be a big debate in standards bodies about SIP versus H.248,” says Rafferty. “Most of the actual implementations from what we can see with respect to media server control are actually in the SIP space, which is the space Cantata has been in from Day One. Certainly some fairly major players have been holdouts, notably Ericsson (News - Alert), which has been a big advocate for H.248. They’re taking similar stances within the standards bodies. But the media control work in the IETF is getting pretty broad participation, much broader than what I’ve seen in 3GPP. This will take a couple of years to play out. Our former CTO, Dr. Eric Berger, is one of the co-chairs of the effort over at the IETF. The net result will complement what people are doing today, which are things like MSCML [Media Server Control Markup Language, an IETF protocol used in conjunction with SIP to enable the delivery of advanced multimedia conferencing services over IP networks] and so there may actually be a standard protocol appearing on the other side of this as well.”

“The trend seems to be a tendency to move away from the old SIP info-based approaches and instead devise approaches that will work over TCP and TLS [Transport Layer Security], so there’s more movement in those directions than we’ve seen previously,” says Rafferty. “At Cantata we’re definitely seeing more interest than we’ve seen in the past in terms of customers on the OEM side seriously beefing up security within things like media gateway offerings, and how you control them, so we’ve been seeing a lot of interest from people during 2007 about TLS and SRTP [Secure Real-time Transport Protocol] and that would apply to all of the different media types be it voice, fax or whatever.”

“As for fax, the interesting thing about it is that, from a standards perspective, it’s been done for a while,” says Rafferty. “Cantata released its T.34 fax several years ago, and that was the last major wave of adoption over on the TDM side. On the IP side, T.38 has come on strongly. I was actually heavily involved in the so-called T.37 work. We called it by other names over at the IETF. But, sad to say, for all of the work that we did on it, the main adopter of that work, to date, has really been the voicemail community. They picked up on the TIFF-F stuff and supported it within their efforts regarding fax mailboxes. But the generalized server community is mostly focused on IP and how to IP-enable a fax machine, or IP-enable a fax server, and so forth. So most of the energy there is directed toward using T.38. From a business standpoint, we’re seeing a pretty interesting opportunity there, because there’s been some turbulence between what’s out there in the network, where, by and large, one encounters gateways that don’t support T.38, versus endpoints which increasingly do support T.38. So we actually see a transcoding opportunity there and that’s something that can be served by a product such as our IMG [Integrated Media Gateway]. That’s one of our big ‘up and comers’.

This article is continued on the tmcnet.com website at www.tmcnet.com/1335.1

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