The Service Broker / SCIM market

The concepts of SCIM or Service Broker were introduced in 3GPP IMS specifications, but so far have never been adequately defined (I had the opportunity to address this topic several times).

However, this does not mean that there are no SCIM or Service Broker products (or product components) on the market!

Light Reading has just issued a report called Combining Telco Services: The Network Service Broker Opportunity. As they provide a list of vendors they have surveyed for their report, I decided to have a look at what these companies actually provide by looking at documentation available on their web sites. In this post I will summarize my findings, which are only based on my (potentially erroneous or biased) interpretation of usually high level product descriptions.

Call Control / IN Centric Service Broker / SCIM

Most of these products are presented as equally applicable to Intelligent Networks and IMS, which in some cases might mean that the product is an Intelligent Network one that has been upgraded to support SIP, or that the supplier hopes that what is good for IN will also be good for (telephony-centric) IMS.

As described by Aepona, their Service Broker is primarily a proxy Service Switching Function (SSF) between the switch and multiple IN servers (thus permitting service invocation in multiple servers, what a switch is usually unable to do). As an IMS "SCIM", it performs a similar function between the S-CSCF and multiple ASs. Because of its dual SIP/IN nature, the Service Broker can also serve as a gateway between IMS and IN (the "IM SSF" entity in 3GPP IMS specifications).

The description of the AppTrigger's Ignite Application Session Controller (ASC) includes a "SCIM+". Like Aepona's Service Broker, ASC sits between the network and the "application cloud". IMS is explicitly listed along legacy TDM networks that can appear below the ACS, but the figure on the web page does not show IMS at all, only entities of a fixed IP access network. The product supports Parlay X, MAP/CAMEL and SIP. It also supports SIP to IN interworking (IM SSF).

OpenCloud is the supplier of a JAIN SLEE platform, a standardized Java service execution platform that was initially targeted at new generation IN services (IN services implemented in Java on an open platform and possibly using non-call related service capabilities like location or SMS as part of their logic). Such a platform can also support SIP and Diameter interfaces and can therefore be positioned as a SIP AS platform as well. On their page, Opencloud speak about a Service Interaction SLEE (SIS) for IN, and another one for IMS. The SIS supports service interaction and composition. The SIS can also offload an IN server by supporting some IN logic itself (logic as it is based on an IN service platform).

jNetX is another supplier of a JAIN SLEE platform. I was not able to find any information about a SCIM or Service Broker on their site, but if they have one it is very likely to be similar to what Aepona, AppTrigger and Opencloud offer.

I could not find a precise description of Tekelec's TekSCIM Service Mediator. However, as it is supposed to provide a seamless experience to TDM and IMS users, and its IMS role is to manage and simplify complex service interactions, I assume this is more or less the same type of product.

These products often have a clear interest in a TDM IN context, and I think this should be the primary reason why an operator might be interested in them. On the other hand, I am more doubtful about their value in an IMS context, even for the support of telephony services, and this for the following reasons:

- An IMS S-CSCF has the capability to chain several ASs in SIP signalling, so such a feature supported by a SCIM/SB would be functionally redundant.

- Call control Service Interaction Management is an important issue that has never been addressed in a satisfactory generic manner in IN networks, more especially when implemented in a standalone box outside of application servers. Why would this change now and more especially in an IMS context?

- Unless it is used to emulate the TDM network, IMS is a very different type of network, and SIP has nothing to do with INAP or CAP. What is good and necessary for TDM is not obviously good and necessary in IMS.

- Providing added value call control services in IMS is necessary, but it is not what operators will make money with. A SCIM/SB centered around voice-centric call control is by no means the magic box that will solve all operators' IMS related problems.

- The interest of an IM SSF function is questionable. IN platforms are often old and costly, and operators often have to fully rely on the supplier of the platform for developing new services. Is it interesting for operators to extend the life of these platforms for many years by positioning them in their long term IMS strategy? On the contrary, many would prefer to replace their IN servers by new application servers able to control TDM calls as well as IMS ones, and this is exactly what the ongoing 3GPP IMS Centralized Services (ICS) initiative is trying to achieve.

TCAP / Web Services Gateway

Convergin's Accolade WCS SCIM seems to be a gateway supporting translation between TCAP and web services. It is not clear to me if this is only this and if it is limited to TCAP (leaving the task of supporting CAP, MAP or INAP to the application) or if it also supports a direct translation of these protocols to web services.

The first thing to say is that this does not correspond at all to what someone can expect from a product called "SCIM".

The second thing to say is that, whether the name is appropriate or not, this component can be very interesting in an IMS context, when it is associated to an IP-centric service platform, which lacks native support of legacy SS7-based protocols to access legacy service capabilities in the TDM network. This is typically the case of J2EE platforms supporting SIP servlets for IMS, which are offered by well known companies like IBM, Oracle or Sun.

These platforms are ideal to implement innovative IMS applications which can combine usage of SIP, HTTP, Diameter and web services, thus permitting convergence between the Internet, Enterprise IT and the new Telco domains. So far, the lacking capability has been the possibility to conveniently connect with the legacy TDM telco world (OSA/Parlay gateways have not proved to be simple and cost effective enough).

I do not think that such a product would allow a J2EE server to become a suitable platform to implement classical IN services. On the other hand, they could permit to implement new TDM-centric services that make use of IMS enablers like presence or instant messaging, or IMS-centric services that need to use TDM capabilities like starting a pure TDM call.

Consequently, this is not a surprise if Convergin seems to be in business with the J2EE suppliers I mentioned.

SIP-level Orchestration Engine

This is the approach adopted by suppliers of J2EE platforms (IBM, Oracle/BEA, Sun?), which usually clearly distinguish between the need to orchestrate web services, using a standard like BPEL, and the need to orchestrate services invoked through SIP requests. Differences may lie in both semantical and performance aspects.

In this context, the SCIM/SB corresponds to the concept of application router, defined in JSR 289, the latest SIP servlets specification. The original mechanism specified for invoking SIP servlet applications, based on servlet mapping rules that are quite similar to web servlet mapping rules in the fact that they rely on a quite simplistic analysis of incoming SIP messages, has proved to be inadequate for a proper selection and composition of IMS services hosted by a J2EE platform. The application router permits to replace the servlet mapping rules by an intelligent component tailored to the needs of the operator.

The intelligence itself is not standardized, and this is therefore an important differentiation area for suppliers or for operators who may decide to specify and possibly implement their own application router.

The service invocation and chaining logic may take into account subscription information (which services the user is subscribed to) as well as other information related to the user, such as presence, service preferences (e.g. the user wants this service to be executed at certain times) or calendar information.There might also be more or less sophisticated rules related to the composition of services.

The ideas for a SCIM I exposed on this blog fit in this context, with the concern to remain as simple as possible and avoid too much intelligence, complexity and processing delays in this component. I think that the suppliers of J2EE platforms are trying to offer the possibility for more sophisticated rules, adding both more potential and more risks to the concept.

Global Orchestration Engine

This seems to be the case for the Alcatel-Lucent Service Broker, implemented by Bell Labs, which is part of the Alcatel Lucent Service Delivery Platform (SDP). The component supports both SIP and web services interfaces, and examples given illustrate access to user subscription information, service preferences, presence, as well as access to other services like IPTV through web services.*

This Service Broker therefore seems to be an integrated equivalent to the combination of a web services orchestration engine and a SIP application dispatcher as proposed by J2EE suppliers.

A potential reason for this difference is that Alcatel Lucent provide their own SIP servlets container, which is a standalone component that needs to be integrated with a third party J2EE platform for converged services. The service broker would therefore permit integration with J2EE web containers (integration which is much tighter in J2EE platforms supporting both web and SIP servlets) and would transfer web services orchestration to the Alcatel Lucent SIP-centric component as well.

Such an approach might offer advantages, more especially in terms of performance, but could also come with associated complexity, a lack of compliance to web services orchestration standards, and the gain obtained through a tighter integration of different orchestrations may also lead to less flexibility for the operator. However, this would be an aspect to investigate.

Service Management Mediation

Leapstone's CCE ServiceBroker is a tool that applies both to legacy networks and IMS. It aims at making easier the management and provisioning of packaged services, including subscriber management and live management of composition and interaction rules between blended services.

From an IMS perspective, this means that the operator may use serviceBroker to define service composition rules and to generate appropriate data for an HSS (Initial Filter Criteria) and a SCIM, as well as for other network databases.

As such, ServiceBroker appears to be a management complement associated to what is usually called a SCIM or Service Broker. More generally, this is a service and subscriber management mediation tool as can already be found on the
market, but enriched with IMS-specific service composition requirements.

Such a tool is very important but also requires ad-hoc adaptations in order to fit in specific environments, considering that management interfaces are usually vendor-specific. Concerning the SCIM/SB, this is even worse as this component is not standardized and leaves room for very different implementations, as can be seen in this post.

Other SCIMs / Service Brokers

Considering the list provided by Light Reading, I was not able to find anything about the Ericsson and Huawei implementations of the concept.

Conclusions

The concept of SCIM / Service Broker, which is part of IMS specifications but has never been specified, leaves room to multiple interpretations and very different products claiming this label can be found on the market.

You can basically find two mainstream interpretations:

- The SCIM / SB is a standalone component that takes care of classical call control and IN issues related to the support of multiple application servers and complex interactions between call control services. The concept is primarily aimed at legacy networks and is also promoted as being equally applicable (and important) for IMS. The telephony context is clear and while everyone can have its own opinion on the interest of such a product for IMS, I will assume that no-one can seriously claim that this component will help an operator finding new sources of revenue with IMS (the key term here is "leveraging", applied to TDM and IMS in the context of telephony).

- The SCIM / SB is a component part of a service delivery platform, and its aim is to complement what the IMS core network component called S-CSCF can do for the composition and "blending" of several services. Such a SCIM / SB can be specialized in SIP-level orchestration (a dedicated engine will do the equivalent for web services) or can address both SIP and web services orchestration.

The first interpretation is closer to the initial motivation for introducing the concept in 3GPP specifications, while the second is closer to what the real IMS need actually is.

A major architecture difference between the two interpretations is that the first one is a standalone product standing between the IMS core network and application servers, while the second is an added-value component of a more comprehensive product usually called service delivery platform in the telecom context (an application server in its own right).

The description I made of a SCIM on this blog is essentially one of the second category. However, since then I thought a little bit about what a standalone SCIM / SB could be, in the terms of which value it could provide to a SCIM / SB embedded in a service platform can do.

I cannot divulge here the content of these thoughts, as they are being discussed with a customer company of Arismore, but to make it short I think there is a lot of added-value a standalone SCIM / Service Broker could add to a service platform -embedded one, while being very different from what the market has to offer right now. More especially, such a product would have no relationship to IN and call control.

If you are knowledgeable in some of the products I surveyed in this post, do not hesitate to contact me in order to correct or complement it. I will gladly compile and post feedbacks, including those that make a point against my assertions.

Christophe

Course on the IMS Application Layer

Through my company Arismore, I am offering a 2-day course on the IMS application layer. It can be delivered either in French or in English (all the material is in English). There are sessions regularly organized in my company's premises in Saint-Cloud, Paris, France, which are open to individuals. The course can also be delivered on site, within or outside Europe.

What makes this course unique is that, while others usually provide a litteral description of IMS specifications and essentially concentrate on the IMS core network, largely overlooking the IMS service architecture, sometimes even delivering misleading information, this one totally concentrates on this domain in which resides the true potential of IMS for differentiation and revenue generation (both for operators and suppliers). You can take this course after a regular IMS one, but my experience shows that even IMS novices can follow it without missing any core network background.

The course does not only describe IMS application-related specifications that span multiple standardization organizations (3GPP, the IETF, OMA, ETSI TISPAN). It also helps understanding what lies behind them, by providing revealing insights on how they were produced (e.g. historical timeline, assumptions, mistakes, conflicts between companies, need to address specific issues), shows in details how they effectively work, explains how they can optimally be exploited to deliver innovative services or innovatively deliver existing ones, and finally addresses the main opportunities and challenges that IMS brings to the industry. After this course, the student can understand what IMS can deliver, why there exist so many conflicting perceptions of IMS, and why IMS is as much a challenge as a promise.

Several on site sessions have been given or are planned in the near future, and the response has been so positive that these sessions usually lead to discussions about further collaboration between the customer company and Arismore.

Contact me at cgourraud@yahoo.ca if you are interested in either an on site session or in a session organized in our offices in Paris (planned dates can be found in the side bar of the blog).

Here follows a description of the course. You can also request from me a slightly more detailed powerpoint content description.

Part 1: The IMS Service Architecture

This is the most comprehensive part of the course. It addresses several objectives: understanding how the IMS service architecture works (dynamic view), getting an overview of the specifications (static view), understanding the drivers behind standardization decisions (motivations, design by accident, pending issues), understanding how the architecture can be used (application layer architecture, service patterns).

Standardized topics include:
- Overview of the architecture
- IMPUs & PSIs
- ISC usage scenarios & examples
- Details of ISC
- Service profiles and initial filter criterias (iFCs)
- OSA SCS / IM SSF / SIP AS
- MRFC/MRFP
- SCIM & Service Broker
- IMS Communication Services
- User Data Management (Sh, OMA XDM, GUP)

The service features of SIP are treated as a specific topic. It highlights the potential of the protocol when used in IMS or in other networks:
- Multimedia sessions
- Event packages
- Routing alternatives (SIP forking, callee capabilities/caller preferences), GRUUs)
- Support of Group Services
- Combination with other protocols (content indirection, SIP REFER, SIP session, body in SIP message)
- Interoperability aspects (between SIP profiles, between SIP and other protocols)

Service oriented features specific to the IMS service architecture, and complementing the intrinsic SIP ones are also detailed. This part permits to understand the value IMS adds on other SIP-based networks:
- Service composition
- Logic mutualization
- Personalization / Differentiation of user experience
- Simple access to services
- Service flexibility / agility
- Authorization to services
- Unlimited service scalability
- Multi-vendorship / Differentiation for each service
- Service anthropomorphism
- Usage of a single identity for multiple services

Part 2: IMS standardized services and enablers

This part covers IMS services and enablers standardized or under standardization in 3GPP, OMA and ETSI TISPAN. As for Part 1, background information about the standardization process is given.

User data services & enablers:
- Presence (IETF, 3GPP, OMA specifications)
- Group Management / Group Services

Voice oriented services & enablers:
OMA Push To Talk Over Cellular (Poc) V1 and V2
3GPP Combining circuit-switched and IMS services (CSI)
3GPP Voice Call Continuity (VCC)
3GPP/TISPAN Multimedia Telephony (MMTel)
3GPP IMS Centralized Services (ICS)
3GPP Conferencing

Messaging services & enablers:
OMA SIP Push
Messaging (IETF IM, 3GPP IMS Messaging, OMA SIMPLE IM)
3GPP SMS over generic IP access
OMA Converged IP Messaging (CPM) - Messaging part

Multimedia services & enablers:
OMA Converged IP Messaging (CPM) - Multimedia part
TISPAN IPTV

This part ends with a description of the Rich Communication Suite (RCS) initiative

Part 3: Opportunities & Challenges

This final part addresses essential topics which go beyond IMS specifications.

It is structured around the following topics:
- Fixed Mobile Convergence (from technical to user oriented convergence: opportunities and challenges)
- Which role(s) for the operators (e.g. bitpipe provider, intelligent pipe/channel provider, service provider with more or less control)
- Exploiting IMS Capabilities (e.g. User Oriented Architecture, Distributed Service Architecture, need for optimizing the IMS service architecture)
- Service Platforms (e.g. black boxes vs. open platforms, JAIN SLEE, J2EE)
- IMS as a service integration framework (different types of IMS services, how to integrate non-IMS services into IMS, relationship to 3rd party service providers)

Christophe

3GPP Communication Services

In the past, I had the opportunity to write three posts (here and there and there) about the 3GPP concept of Communication Service. These posts were written in the heat of possibly major IMS-defining decisions being taken, in order to warn about some risks related to some options. Time has passed and the concept is now (nearly totally) specified in IMS. In this post I will describe Communication Services and how they can be used by operators.

Definition

According to TS 23.228, "an IMS communication service is a type of communication defined by a service definition that specifies the rules and procedures and allowed medias for a specific type of communication and that utilises the IMS enablers."

Examples of Communication Services are OMA Push To Talk over Cellular (PoC) or OMA SIMPLE Instant Messaging (also called IMS Messaging in 3GPP specifications).

In other words a Communication Service is a set of communication media and the rules that govern the possible (i.e. permitted) transactions between them. For instance, OMA SIMPLE Instant Messaging only permits SIP sessions to include messaging components. Trying to upgrade a messaging session into a voice session is not part of the OMA SIMPLE IM service, and can be considered as a violation of the OMA SIMPLE IM Communication Service.

A Communication Service is identified in SIP signalling through an IMS Communication Service Identifier (ICSI). The format as well as an example of ICSI can be found in TS 24.229:urn-xxx:3gpp-service.ims.icsi.mmtel (Multimedia Telephony).

An IMS application can use a Communication Service to be delivered to the end-user. For instance, an application could push content to a user by using the OMA SIMPLE IM Communication Service. Such an application can be identified in SIP signalling through an IMS Application Reference Identifier (IARI) for which TS 24.229 also provides an example: g.3gpp.app_ref="urn%3Aurn-xxx%3A3gpp-application.ims.iari.game-v1". Note that IARIs are only meaningful for IMS clients and are totally ignored by IMS core network entities. This is why I will not mention them much in the following.

The list of Communication Services associated to a user is provisioned in the service profile of the user in the HSS. This list is used by the S-CSCF for its processing of SIP requests. It is also provisioned in IMS clients for usage.

The IETF draft describing the necessary SIP extensions to support the concept of Communication Service states that all the information required for a network to understand the service requested by a user should be derivable from the SIP request (e.g. by looking at the SDP and the request-uri in a SIP INVITE), without the need for an explicit identifier like an ICSI. It accordingly states that the ICSI is a way for the network to save computational resources required to inspect the SIP request. I would tend to disagree with this analysis. First, the ICSI does not only define how a user wants to start the session, it also explicitly defines that the user will not try or may not be allowed to later renegotiate the session in a way that is not specified by the service definition. Moreover, an IMS S-CSCF will not make the economy of analyzing the request, as it will have to ensure that the ICSI and both the initial and subsequent INVITEs in the session are coherent one with the others. Therefore, the usage of Communication Services will rather increase the need for computational resources in the S-CSCF than lower it.

What Communication Services could have been

The company which introduced the concept of Communication Service in 3GPP had a quite radical proposal of how it would be used:
- The usage of a Communication Service would have been mandatory in all SIP requests initiated by an IMS client. A side-effect was that all IMS applications would have had to rely on a Communication Service, thus strongly limiting opportunities for IMS services.
- Two SIP clients would not have been able to set up a session together if they did not share the same Communication Service. This would have implied that a client supporting OMA SIMPLE IM and a client able to support both messaging and voice within the same SIP session would not be able to establish a session together, even if they shared a common media component permitting to communicate. This would also have implied that a SIP client without any knowledge of IMS-specific ICSIs would not have been able to set up sessions with an IMS client.
- Usage of Communication Services totally relied on the IETF-specified Contact and Accept-Contact headers (in which ICSIs and IARIs would have been included as media feature tags), thus using a standard IETF header in a non-standard way and adding to interoperability issues with non-IMS SIP clients.

Would have they been accepted, these proposals would have raised important barriers to service innovation in the IMS domain, and would have caused huge interoperability problems between IMS and non-IMS clients, de facto creating a walled garden out of IMS.

A side effect is that the concept would have created a two-tiered IMS application layer, with application servers supporting (standardized) Communication Services at the bottom, and application servers supporting applications making use of Communication Services at the top. The lower tier would typically have consisted of standardized services implemented as black boxes supplied by classical network equipment suppliers, and the (rather power-less) upper tier by open platforms provided by IT suppliers (more or less what you can find in a pre-IMS telecommunications network, with OSA/Parlay usually defining the frontier between the two layers). This two-tiered architecture would have been reproduced within IMS clients.

However, in their current state, due to the involvement of the IETF and the consensus imposed by companies which did not endorse this original view, 3GPP specifications are quite far from this.

General benefits of Communication Services

Communication Services can be useful to all operators, even if their strategies clearly differ, as long as each operator has options about how it wants to use them. Representing an operator, I had in the past the opportunity to discuss the issue with the supplier promoting the concept. After expressing my concerns about it and hearing their arguments in its favor, I told them: "Communication Services are fine with me as long as, as an operator, I can use them when I see an interest for it and not use them when I do not see any". Since then, this possibility to use Communication Services a la carte is what has been specified.

These usage options start at the IMS client, which may but is not mandated to insert an ICSI (and possibly IARI) in a SIP request it generates. They also exist further in the processing of SIP signalling by the IMS core network, as you will see below.

But first, let us consider the aspects of Communication Services that may appeal to all operators.

Communication Services can make the life of operators easier in some aspects.

Put a label on a service, transport this label end-to-end in SIP signalling, and you get a practical handle for charging (more especially when several operators and/or transit network suppliers are involved in the end-to-end communication), QoS and policy control, and to set your initial filter criteria for involving ASs supporting the service. However, this does not mean that the IMS core network should ease on its processing. For instance, current IMS specifications permit to charge a session based on both accounting information related to SIP signalling (e.g. this is a messaging session with a beginning and an end) and media level information (e.g. this is indeed messaging that goes through). It would be risky for an operator to assume that because an ICSI states that the session is about messaging and messaging only, this is actually the case. If so, Communication Services could be a great weapon for fraud.

The usage of ICSIs in users' service profiles to determine the routing to application servers can be of great interest as I will illustrate now. Imagine that an IMS client initiates an INVITE for messaging while the operator has deployed OMA IM SIMPLE, OMA CPM and OMA PoC V2, which all may start with such an INVITE. The operator may face the tricky challenge to decide to which application server the request should be routed in the case where the user is subscribed to at least two of these services. By placing an ICSI identifying the service it wants to use, the IMS client indicates to the network that this is this service and not this one that it intends to use.

Passed these basic, different handling of communication services are possible, which map to different strategies.

The two sections below describe these potential differences. What is common between both is that an IMS client may insert an ICSI in a SIP request it generates, but this is not a mandatory standard procedure. When a client wants to use a communication service (and possibly a specific application making use of it), it inserts the ICSI in a header called P-Preferred-Service. It may also include the ICSI and IARI in Accept-Contact headers (currently 3GPP is not clear about the exact procedure for this).

Communication Services for advanced user control

The S-CSCF serving a user (the originating one for requests initiated by the user, the terminating one for requests received by the user) may be mandated to insert an ICSI in all the requests it receives. For doing so, it compares the request with the list of ICSIs provisioned in the user's service profile for a match. This ICSI is inserted in a P-Asserted-Service header created by the S-CSCF. In the case where the IMS client created a P-Preferred-Service header, it is removed by the S-CSCF, and it is possible that the ICSI inserted by the S-CSCF and the original ICSI are different. The S-CSCF will also insert an ICSI in SIP requests which did not have any P-Preferred-Service header.

When an ICSI inserted by a user does not match the request (e.g. the user inserted an OMA SIMPLE IM ICSI and actually has an SDP body for a voice session) or the ICSI in the SIP request is not in the list of authorized ICSIs in the user's service profile, or the S-CSCF cannot map the request to any of the ICSIs authorized for the user, the S-CSCF may simply reject the request.

Once a SIP session has started, the S-CSCF may also reject renegotiations of the session that do not correspond to the service definition (e.g. a user tries to upgrade an OMA SIMPLE IM session to voice).

More liberal usages of Communication Services

An operator may inhibit all the restrictive behavior of the S-CSCF by not provisioning any ICSI in the service profile of a user. In this case, an IMS client can still insert an ICSI in a SIP request (the ICSI may have been provisioned in the client or may be hard-coded) and the ICSI may still be used to route the request to an application server, for charging, QoS or policy control, but the S-CSCF cannot insert an asserted ICSI and reject any request. Note that such an ICSI cannot be trusted by the core network but an AS can be used for this purpose.

If an operator provisions ICSIs in the service profile of the user, it can still decide that the S-CSCF should not reject requests as in the specification this decision is left to the operator's policy. The S-CSCF will just insert the P-Asserted-Service header.

Finally, even if the most restrictive S-CSCF behavior could apply, its potential impossibility to unambiguously associate one ICSI to a request (e.g. the user is authorized to use an OMA SIMPLE IM and an OMA CPM ICSI while both services can start with a messaging session) mandates it not to insert any ICSI in the request, de facto inhibiting its restrictive processing.

Interoperability with non-IMS cients

The IETF solved the potential interoperability issues between IMS and non-IMS clients by clearly discriminating between, on the one hand the usage of ICSIs and IARIs in the SIP Accept-Contact and Contact headers, which comply with the IETF procedures for a SIP client to declare its capabilities to a network (so-called callee capabilities) and for a SIP client to indicate preferences or instruct a SIP network about how the request it generated should be routed/forked (so-called caller preferences), and on the other hand the usage of ICSIs for network-centric usage within an IMS network (definition of two 3GPP specific headers: P-Preferred-Service and P-Asserted-Service).

Based on 3GPP procedures, a non-IMS client may receive a SIP request from an IMS client that includes a P-Asserted-Service header, but this header will simply be ignored and will not impact processing in the non-IMS client.

ICSIs and IARIs populated in the Accept-Contact header do not create interoperability problems either, as this header can (optionally) be used by a client to help selecting an application to be contacted but is primarily aimed at SIP proxies, instructing them about how to route the request.

However, there might still be a case where an IETF-compliant usage of Accept-Contact may prevent an IMS client to initiate a session with a non-IMS client: if the Accept-Contact header that includes the ICSI or IARI also includes both the "explicit" and "require" parameters, it instructs the SIP proxy not to route the request to a SIP client that did not explicitly declared its support of the ICSI (or IARI). As non-IMS clients are very likely not to being even aware of IMS ISCIs and IARIs, the IMS client would never be able to set up a session with them (however, the funny thing is that a non-IMS client would be able to set up a session with an IMS one).

At the moment, 3GPP did not decide on how ICSIs and IARIs should be used in Accept-Contact, but the risk I just mentioned is explicitly stated as a note in TS 24.229, which indicates that some companies are very wary about the issue. In any case, there is a need to clarify this aspect, and this might have to be done either globally (e.g. an IMS client shall not use these two parameters for ICSIs, but it might use them for some IARIs if the corresponding application requires it), or service per service, unless it is left to the decision of the operator.

Potential issues with ICSIs

To be used for advanced control, ICSIs require additional provisioning in the service profile of the user (HSS) as well as in IMS clients.

ICSIs now make the S-CSCF service aware, as it has to be able to compare ICSIs to SIP requests and SDP bodies into session initiation and session re-negotiation requests. At best this may imply a reconfiguration of the S-CSCF each time a new communication service is introduced (standardized or operator-specific). At worst this may imply an upgrade of the S-CSCF.

The S-CSCF processing of ICSIs (checking if a request matches the ICSI in it, trying to find an ICSI for a request without any, checking if session renegotiation matches what is permitted for an ICSI) will add to resource consumption and end-to-end delays. In the case where ICSIs do not significantly simplify other procedures of the IMS core network (and I do not think they will), this is a pure loss for core network characteristics. This might be a minor factor, but it could also be an important one once IMS traffic grows in important proportions.

Any future for Communication Services used for control?

In its current state of specification, the concept of Communication Service can be used both by liberal operators and by operators wishing to exert a strong control over their customers.

In the liberal approach, ICSIs can be used to facilitate the routing of service requests to the right application server(s). No constraining behavior of the S-CSCF will be mandated, and while ICSIs can be used as a convenient way to identify a service (for instance in charging records), they will not significantly help the task of core network entities in their processing (e.g. generating accurate charging records).

In the controlling approach, ICSIs can be used as a means to check that users only access (typically silo) services they are explicitly authorized to use, and that they cannot escape control (at least at SIP level) during the session.

Maybe the controlling approach will be used by some operators. However, considering the facts that ICSIs do not only come with benefits and that users may be led to draw comparisons between operators with a strong controlling and a more liberal approach, I am not sure right now that Communication Services are promised to a bright IMS future. Future will tell.

Christophe

References:
Definitions and requirements: TS 23.228 chapter 4.13
Detailed procedures by IMS client: TS 24229 chapters 5.1.1.2.1 (declaration of supported ICSIs as callee capabilities at registration), 5.1.2A.1 (generation of SIP request), 5.1.2A.2 (reception of SIP request)
Detailed procedures by S-CSCF: TS 24.229 chapter 5.4.3.2 (originating requests), 5.4.3.3 (terminating requests)
Communication Services in Service Profiles: TS 29.228 Appendix B (B.2 and B.2.1A)

IMS Service Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of uniquely human characteristics and qualities to nonhuman beings, inanimate objects, or natural or supernatural phenomena (wikipedia).

The pictures taken from various cartoons by Tex Avery that you can see at the top of this post illustrate an anthropomorphic behavior associated to animals.

Service anthropomorphism is therefore the possibility for an IMS service to behave and be treated as a human user of the IMS network. This post describes how IMS supports service anthropomorphism and what an anthropomorphic service can do and benefit from.

Symetric usage of SIP between IMS users and IMS services

The IMS service architecture ensures that every SIP request that is generated or processed by an IMS client can also be generated or processed by an IMS application server.

For instance, if an IMS client can generate a SIP instant message, set up a SIP session, or subscribe to the presence of another user, an IMS application server can do it as well.

Conversely, if an IMS client can receive a SIP instant message, process a SIP session set up request or process a SUBSCRIBE to any SIP event package (e.g. presence), an IMS application server can also do as well.

An interesting consequence of this feature is that the concept of enabler (the possibility for a service to use a remote feature) is simple to implement in an IMS network, and can be extremely powerful.

In a traditional telecommunications architecture, some services offered to an end-user can also be used as an enabler by an application server. This is the case for network-based user location in a mobile network, which can accessed in a location server from both a device and an application server hosting location-based services. However, in most cases, the user to service interface and the service to service interface are different, and both need to be specified and implemented for the application to be used as both an end-user service and an enabler by other services. In IMS, as soon as a service is deployed in the network, for which a SIP based interface has been defined for access by IMS clients, the exact same interface can immediately be used by other IMS application servers to access the service as an enabler for their own services. In theory and when it makes sense from a service perspective, every new IMS service can become an enabler for other services, which themselves can become enablers for other services. There is therefore a high potential for an explosion of service opportunities each time a new IMS service is deployed in the network.

Another difference with a traditional telecommunications network is that, in such a network, a service enabler is always network-based. As devices are more or less stupid, every added-value logic that can serve other services is located on a server in the network. On the other hand, with IMS, every logic processing SIP requests can theoratically be located both in IMS clients and in IMS application servers. While complex logic (e.g. full-featured presence) will tend to be located in powerful IMS ASs, simpler logic can be located in the IMS client and be accessed by an AS through SIP. For instance, IMS clients can support SIP event packages (using SUBSCRIBE, NOTIFY, PUBLISH) that are able to inform and notify ASs about what is located or is happening in the IMS client: session states, information located in device, information or status about a specific device-based application like a game. This implies that, with IMS, the concept of enabler is extended from the network to the endpoints, and this offers potentially huge service opportunities.

Finally, in a traditional network a service and the enabler it accesses are most of the time located in the same operator's domain, as addressing, request routing and security issues are important barriers to overcome for inter-operator interfaces. In an IMS network, SIP routing procedures cross boundaries between networks with secured interfaces, and the addressing of SIP enablers is based on public identities like IMS Public User Identities (IMPUs) and Public Service Identities (PSIs). This implies that, technically, a presence based service from one operator can access the presence of a user subscribed with a different operator (or located in the Internet, but then with security risks).

In an IMS network, all SIP requests originate from a public identity (IMPU, PSI) and are addressed to a public identity (IMPU, PSI). How do IMS application servers fit in this picture?

Service impersonating a user

An IMS AS can process requests addressed to an IMPU of a user it serves, and can generate a SIP request on behalf of a user, by placing an IMPU as the originator of the request it (the AS) actually generates.

For instance, an AS hosting session control logic for a user can receive the INVITEs addressed to an IMPU of this user and serve it on its behalf (e.g. accept or reject the session). In another example, IMS presence requests are always addressed to an IMPU of the user from which the presence is sought. In theory, this request could and should be routed to one or several IMS clients associated to the user, but in practice they are all routed to a network-based AS serving presence requests on its behalf.

In yet another example, consider a service that decides on the best way to route messages issued by user A. Possible alternatives include IMS messaging to the same IMPU, IMS messaging to another IMPU, SMS, MMS, email, or an Internet IM service. When user A issues an IMS message to user B, this message is routed to the AS supporting the advanced routing function. This AS can then extract the IMPU of user B from the IM, and generate a presence request originated from user A and addressed to user B. This request will reach the presence server of user B, possibly in another network, which will apply authorization rules associated to user A and generate an appropriate response. This response may provide information to the service about the messaging alternatives available for user B, as well as the associated addresses, preferences, and reachability. It can therefore select the most appropriate approach to deliver the message to user B. In this use case, it is very important for the advanced routing service to endorse the identity of user A, because it acts on its behalf and must benefit from the exact same information as user A would.

This means that an IMS service can act as a network-based agent or proxy of a user (and here I do not mean "SIP User Agent" and "SIP Proxy").

Service acting as itself

A service can also receive requests addressed to a PSI that identifies itself, or generate a request using its own PSI as the originator.

This may permit a service to communicate with a user ("Hey, I am your voicemail") or to benefit from privileges associated to a service (e.g. when the service generates a presence request to a presence server located in the same domain, it has full access rights and top priority toward all users' presence information).

Group Management

Group management permits a user (or an operator) to regroup a set of URIs (SIP or others) into a set which is identified and addressable via a PSI. Such a group PSI can then be used in SIP requests, which then automatically become group requests through appropriate support in IMS application servers. For instance, an IM addressed to a group will be exploded to individual IMs sent to each member of the group, a presence request to a group will be decomposed into individual presence requests, and an INVITE to a group will automatically start a conference. Groups can also be utilized within application servers to define, e.g. black or white lists.

An IMPU and a PSI have the exact same formats (either a SIP URI or a TEL URI).

This means that groups of services identified by a PSI can be defined, as well as groups mixing IMPUs and PSIs. Consequently, everything that can be made towards user groups can also be made towards service groups and service/user groups. For instance, conference session setup can relate to groups including both human beings and automatons like a media server.

Associating services to services

There exist several approaches to route a SIP request addressed to a PSI to an AS serving this PSI. Most approaches rely on a direct mapping between the PSI (SIP or TEL URI) and the address of a server. They differ by where the mapping is defined (DNS, HSS), constraints on how the PSI URI is constructed, and where the routing is performed (originating S-CSCF, I-CSCF).

One approach is different, and while the IMS specifications never describe what it permits, its potential is much more significant from a service perspective. It lies in the association of a service profile to the PSI in the HSS, the same way service profiles are associated to IMPUs, which permit the routing of SIP requests associated to the IMPU to IMS application servers. With this approach a PSI is provisioned in the HSS like an IMPU, except that not all information need to be provisioned (e.g. no need for authentication information).

A first interest of this approach is that not all requests addressed to a PSI have to be routed to the same server. Some requests might be routed to one and others to another, based on initial filter criteria in the PSI service profile.

A very interesting feature of this approach, which is not related to service anthropomorphism, is that if an IMS user decides to make a user group consisting of the members of its family, identified by a PSI like sip:MyFamily@operator.com, an INVITE addressed to the PSI might be routed to a conferencing server, a MESSAGE addressed to the same PSI to an IM exploder, and a SUBSCRIBE to the PSI to a resource list server (in order to explode the request toward each member and compile the results in a single NOTIFY). Compare to the other approaches, which will route requests addressed to sip:MyFamily@operator.com to a single server, actually forcing the user to define a different PSI for each service it would like to apply to its family if it wants different services to apply (e.g. sip:MyFamily@conferencing.operator.com). This need to define a specific SIP URI for a combination group/service is also the way you will have to proceed in a non-IMS SIP network. This is an interesting example of how IMS can add value over non-IMS SIP networks and make the life of a user easier.

To come back to the subject of this post, let us consider a streaming service for a live event like a concert. An IMS user will typically start viewing the event by generating a SIP INVITE to a PSI identifying the live event. With service profile based SIP routing, the operator could define that a SUBSCRIBE to the presence event package would be routed to a presence server instead of the streaming media server (to which INVITEs will be routed). This would permit to associate presence information to the live event, like a description of the live event, information on how to subscribe to it, and status information (delayed, not started, starting, started). A user subscribing to the live event's presence could then be automatically be notified about when it can start viewing it.

In effect, associating a presence to the live event is associating a service to it, the same way presence can be a service associated to a user.

But there are other ways to associate a service to a service. Service profile -based routing permits to chain different services in the SIP signalling path. Consider an anti-spam application the operator proposes to its IMS customers. Every message addressed to the user can be routed to this application to be analyzed and possibly blocked. Now consider a discussion forum based on IMS messaging. The name of the forum is identified by a PSI (e.g. sip:TheIMSLantern@operator.com) so that each IM addressed to the forum is distributed to all the users currently registered with it. Service-profile based PSI routing would permit the operator to route a SIP request addressed to the forum first to the anti-spam application, then to the forum server. This is as if the discussion forum was treated as an IMS user subscribed to the anti-spam service. Now extend this example with an anti-virus application and an archive server, or think of other examples.

To conclude...

An IMS service can be anthropomorphic because it can act like a user, it can act as a network-based agent of the user, it can interact with other services like a user, it can communicate with "other" users, and it can be associated to other IMS services just like a user.

Note that "IMS service anthropomorphism" is not a standard or a commonly used term. I created it. You might therefore want to be careful and cite your source if if decide to use the term in discussions or in documents.

Christophe

Different Strategies for IMS

Most operators do not want to be reduced to the role of bitpipe provider, offering low cost connectivity to services supplied by other companies. They want to be service providers themselves, and try to figure out how IMS will help them achieving this objective.

This basic point aside, the strategies between operators might diverge, and their differences may essentially lie into the level of control they want IMS to support. This level of control can be illustrated by the following questions, which purposedly address extreme attitudes (it should be understood that intermediate opinions also exist).

Should IMS be fully open to other IP networks, and permit communication and service interoperability with devices and service providers located outside of the traditional telecommunications domain, more especially the Internet? Or should IMS, on the contrary, help operators establishing a new "walled garden", forcing or strongly encouraging the customer to use the services provided by telecommunications operator, and preventing or strongly discouraging them to use services provided in the Internet?

Should IMS foster service innovation, permitting telecommunications operators to differentiate between themselves and compete on value for money to improve their market share? Or should IMS, on the contrary, be used to maintain the old, slow and standardization driven telecommunications model, in which most operators provide the same mass market services and only differentiate at the margin?

Operators in a challenger position, or which are confident in their ability to cope with the new challenges they are facing with the rapid evolution of technologies and customers' habits, are keen on adopting an open IMS and a new approach to service creation. In addition to developing their own services, they are likely to seek other ways to maximize revenues, acting as a channel provider or intelligent pipe provider towards 3rd party service providers, by partnering with them and/or adding values to their services (see here an example of how IMS can be used by an operator to add value to 3rd party services).

Operators with a control freak approach are more in a defensive attitude, having to preserve a market position or facing internal uncertainties about the future world.

These diverging strategies do not only concern operators, as they will directly impact the supplier ecosystem the operators will rely on in the years to come.

Operators favoring service innovation, short development cycles, high service customization, or niche market services, will have to adopt technologies and practices that come from more dynamic business sectors, where state-of-the-art IT and methods are common place. To develop their services, they are likely to rely on open service platforms (e.g. J2EE), enterprise architecture practices, and to primarily view services as applications, developed in-house, purchased off the shelf, or contracted to IT-centric application providers.

On the other hand, operators opting for mass market standardized services, with little differentiation, are likely to maintain the existing ecosystem of traditional equipment and service box suppliers. The more a traditional telecommunications equipment supplier has difficulties to move from telco IT (e.g. proprietary platforms, poor skills at Java, SOA and other advanced IT architecture and programming paradigms, long and costly development cycles) to standard IT, the more this supplier will take as a threat the advent of an all-IP and open IMS era.

How IMS positioned itself a couple of years ago

This was a mixed bag.

Despite what some people think and claim, 3GPP always ensured that IMS was fully interoperable with non-IMS SIP networks. I already addressed this topic in a past post, from which I will only reuse a telling example: IMS session setup.

In order to permit IMS calls to replicate the experience an end-user has when establishing a call in the circuit-switched network, IMS opted for a more complex procedure than the basic IETF SIP one, permitting network resources to be reserved before the call is established. An IMS device is mandated to follow this procedure. While this procedure and the related SIP extensions can also be used in non-IMS networks (these are not 3GPP-specific extensions), it cannot be assumed that all SIP clients will ever support it. Not doing anything about this would have prevented an IMS device to set up sessions with most of non-IMS devices. However, 3GPP did something about this: in case the peer device does not support the complex session setup procedure, the IMS device (or a network based agent acting on its behalf) is mandated to revert to the basic IETF procedure.

The technical ingredients to support service innovation were also there: the intrinsic power of IP and SIP, the powerful IMS service architecture, the SIP servlets specification permitting the integration of SIP-related service logic into advanced and open J2EE platforms, the endorsement of SIP servlets by all the suppliers of J2EE platforms.

However, it did not work out that well, and this can be linked to multiple good and bad reasons: IMS was still a prospective technology (real deployments are starting now), focus was on short-term (hopefully) value generation services (e.g. VoIP, push to talk over cellular), IT-centric platforms were not mature yet, the capabilities of SIP and the IMS service architecture were not well known, no compelling IMS services were proposed, the legacy telecom culture was a handicap that was reflected in the old fashioned silo way OMA (the Open Mobile Alliance) was specifying IMS-based enablers...

I would not claim that all these factors have disappeared now, but some progress has been made in the recent time, as IMS is becoming real.

The last two years: hidden fight between various strategies

3GPP Communication Services are the textbook example of how suppliers and operators with conflicting strategies have used all the subtle (and less subtle) panoply of standardization tricks to push their agendas and counter-agendas in IMS standardization.

I already addressed the topic (here and there) at a time when the fight reached its heights, and I will soon dedicate a post to describe the current status and potential consequences of Communication Services standardization.

For now, suffice to say that:

- Would all the ideas pushed by Communication Services promoters have been accepted, IMS would certainly have become a walled garden preventing interoperability between IMS and non-IMS SIP devices, and huge barriers to innovation by IMS operators would have been erected.

- In the present state of standardization, these risks have been globally averted (thanks to the IETF and some companies active in 3GPP).

I personally view Multimedia Telephony as an initiative that goes in the same control direction. As I already wrote, Multimedia Telephony can be seen as an attempt at defining multimedia sessions as an incremental, person-to-person communication centric evolution of voice telephony. Moreover, at the moment, the content of Multimedia Telephony specifications is limited to the emulation of classical voice telephony services over an IMS network. From this you can derive that, from a target perspective, MMTel is a half full or half empty evolution in direction of the true multimedia experience SIP can provide, and that in any case there is not much hurry to move toward this target.

Another initiative I would strongly liken to MMTel is OMA PoC phase 2. While PoC phase 1 can be described as a 2-party or group walkie talkie service (essentially) for mobile phones, PoC phase 2 significantly enriches the user experience with other media, permitting for instance to transform a session from half duplex voice (original PoC) to full duplex voice, to use text messaging or send images, files or video streams in the session. This is still not full multimedia, but a controlled step in the direction, defined as an enrichment of a service silo looking for a future. As such a silo, PoC has a very interesting feature for companies which are not that thrilled with the idea of interworking with non-IMS devices: PoC is the only IMS service that can be described as fully IMS centric. It was totally specified by the IMS community and has no equivalent in the non-IMS SIP community.

On the other side of the fence, you can undoubtly place the ongoing OMA Converged IP Messaging (CPM) initiative. CPM intends to use the full capabilities of SIP sessions and IMS convergence features. It is multi-access, multi-party, multi-media in the most advanced meaning, and multi-device, supporting both person-to-person and person-to-service sessions. If every thing goes well, instead of a fully standardized service like telephony or PoC, CPM should end up being an architectural framework permitting operators to place or allow any media component one can think of in an IMS session, thus realizing (and possibly improving on) everything one can implement in the Internet using the SIP protocol.

Until recently, I tended to see 3GPP as the standardization body with the most coherent and liberal approach to IMS, and OMA as the organization which, through its heavy pre-IMS heritage and its inadequate organization, would keep on standardizing good old service silos (with overlapping features). However, it looks like this time is over, at least for OMA. This said, thinking about it, this OMA organizational problem (the fact that each group standardizing a service works in parallel to the others while the architecture group works on its own topics instead of ensuring the overall coherency of the OMA architecture like SA2 does in 3GPP) is more obvious than ever when you consider the current situation of OMA specifications: as an operator, you now have no less than three alternatives if you want to deploy an IMS messaging solution, OMA SIMPLE Messaging, OMA PoC phase 2 and OMA Converged IP Messaging, among which the last two can claim to support multimedia sessions as well. Finally, I may withdraw my positive comment about OMA as a whole.

Christophe

IMS Standardization Tracking Report

Tracking the standardization of IMS in 3GPP is a difficult and time consuming task. There are so many working groups involved (e.g. SA1, SA2, SA3, CT1), and so many meetings.

I recently came across Hughes Systique Corporation, a Consulting, Development and System Integration company Headquarted in the US,
which seems to be doing a lot of interesting work in the IMS, Web 2.0 and convergence of the same. Of the various other things they offer, they produce
an 'IMS Standards Tracking report' which is sent out to their clients once in two months and keeps readers updated on new technology updates
in various 3GPP forums, including in IMS-WiMAX interworking. There is an annual subscription at an affordable cost.

Arjun , who is responsible for the IMS & Converged Applications practice in the company contacted me recently and emailed me
a copy of one of their reports to see. He told me, in addition to the report, they also offer free conversations with the key analysts who prepare it. This is a 100% technology
report and not a market one, therefore serving a niche that was missing. With the recently uptake on IMS, Arjun believes this report will be a very cost effective solution for companies
who cannot afford to travel or track 300+ 3GPP CRs in each meeting.

I encourage you to have a look at it. If your company decides to subscribe to the report, please let HSC know that you got the information from The IMS Lantern.

For more details on this report see: http://www.hsc.com/IMSConsulting/index.aspx
For their IMS blog, see: http://www.hsc.com/IMSConsulting/Insight.aspx
For Arjun's personal IMS (and other VoIP/SIP/2.0) blog: http://iconverged.wordpress.com/category/3gpp/

Christophe

An Article from Microsoft

Joseph Hofstader, an architect at Microsoft who writes periodically on Telecommunications technologies, sent to me a link to an article he published on Communications as a Service (CaaS). This is the first in a series of about 3 or 4 he has planned on the topic, diving deeper into architecture and infrastructure.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb896003.aspx

The article is very interesting, clearly describing the capabilities of SIP as a protocol, and the paradigm shift between the traditional concept of communication services and CaaS.

Concerning the IMS related part of the article, readers of The IMS Lantern will understand that I would tend to elaborate more on the IMS service architecture and the unique benefits it can provide, but I understand that this is not the focus of Joe's article. He actually intends to elaborate more on this aspect in his next articles.

Christophe

3GPP Multimedia Telephony & OMA CPM

In this post, I will address two standardization initiatives that try to define the future of communication services based on IMS, and more especially the support of Multimedia Communication.

As you will see, I have a soft spot for one of them (OMA Converged IP Messaging) and a strong bias against the other (3GPP Multimedia Telephony).

3GPP Multimedia Telephony

3GPP Multimedia Telephony (MMTel for short) has appeared in 3GPP release 7 and will evolve in the next releases. The initiative originates from ETSI TISPAN requirements for fixed networks.

The name always made me mad, but it is actually very telling about what MMTel is today.

The service is "multimedia" in the sense that it permits the combination and dynamic re-negotiation of different media components within an IMS session. Sample components include full duplex voice, real time video, text communication, file transfer (e.g. video clip, audio clip, pictures). Note that there is no explicit mention of applications, and the 3GPP requirements state that a "typical usage" is speech (voice) and speech combined with other media components.

On the other hand, this is a "telephony" service, which seems to anchor its definition to the well-known, decades-old, voice-centric, and circuit-switched implemented telephony service. Basically, you could infer that Multimedia Telephony is an incremental evolution of Voice Telephony with the addition of new media components.

This may lead to potential questions when specifying Multimedia Telephony:
- Is the service only related to person-to-person communication or can it apply to person-to-service interactions? I already showed an example of how a multimedia SIP session can be used in a person-to-service relationship, and you will see below that CPM supports it.
- Are current classical telephony supplementary services applicable in a new world where a session can be established with a service, where SIP URIs will eventually replace telephone numbers, where the protocol and the core network permit to reach the user on a multiplicity of devices, where enablers like group management and presence can change the users' behaviors to communication (e.g. is the user available for voice communication now? What are the alternatives?) as well as the way network-based call handling services can be implemented (using presence to take an informed decision), where users can negotiate the content of a session when establishing it, and where services can easily redirect users to web pages to allow them to decide how a call should be handled?

These questions are not purely theoretical when you consider the current standardization state of MMTel: it solely consists of the specification of how classical telephony services like Original Identification Presentation, Call Forwarding Unconditional or Communication Waiting can be implemented in IMS. The requirements specification clearly states that the behavior of each service, "as perceived by the user, should be consistent with the behavior perceived when using the equivalent services on PSTN/ISDN and CS Mobile networks." Isn't this crystal clear?

As such, at the moment MMTel looks like a vehicle to standardize voice-centric telephony services to be supported by a Telephony Application Server (TAS), which may eventually become a Multimedia Telephony Server when voice is not the only media component supported by a call.

The MMTel initiative can be associated to another 3GPP one called IMS Centralized Services (ICS) which aims at having an IMS-based TAS for both CS telephony and IMS telephony. The approach would eventually deprecate existing IN servers in legacy networks and see them replaced by a TAS. Put together, both initiatives draw the following potential roadmap:
1) A TAS for IMS voice telephony
2) A TAS for both CS and IMS based voice telephony
3) A TAS to support IMS-based Multimedia Telephony
Basically, a TAS at the center of the future telecommunications network.

I personally do not believe at all in this incremental approach to Multimedia Communication, as SIP and IMS will drastically change the way people communicate, leaving plain old telephony as a separate service whose usage will gradually decline as people will adopt a totally new way to communicate. A TAS should therefore be seen as an important box in an IMS network, but a box that will remain focused and essentially unchanged until its termination.

True Multimedia Communication is to be supported by something else, and this is...OMA CPM.

OMA Converged IP Messaging (CPM)

OMA Converged IP Messaging is currently under specification within OMA (the Open Mobile Alliance). In my opinion, this is by far to date the most significant step towards an optimal exploitation of IMS capabilities that I described in the past.

The name of this enabler may be misleading, as it seems to imply that CPM is a pure messaging service, while it is not.

Actually, CPM can be defined as a composite specification addressing two concerns:
- Full IMS messaging (OMA SIMPLE IM), including page mode and session-based approaches, as well as transparent interworking with legacy mobile messaging services (SMS, MMS, OMA IMPS). This could certainly be extended to other messaging services like email or Jabber/XMPP in either future versions of the specification or in smart implementations.
- Multimedia communication as I had the opportunity to describe it in the past.

Let's start with the messaging features.

Page mode messaging, which is based on the SIP method MESSAGE can be seen as the equivalent to SMS in the SIP/IMS world. A user can send a page mode short message to another user or a group of users. This message is either delivered instantly over the IMS core network or stored for deferred delivery if the recipient is not available.

Session-based messaging is based on a SIP session, with messages delivered through a protocol called MSRP. Session-based messaging essentially serves two requirements that cannot be fulfilled by page mode messaging: the support of chats, in which messages are exchanged between two or more parties within a dialog context; the possibility to send large volume files like music or video clips. In addition, session-based messaging has two important benefits: it minimizes SIP control traffic to session management, and utilizes a specific protocol for the messages itself, permitting to implement an appropriate support in the network; by reusing the concept of SIP session, it permits messaging to be one component among others in a multimedia session.

Interworking with legacy messaging services like SMS and MMS permits CPM to be interesting from the start, as it does not rely only on the initially limited IMS community to deliver its services.

The scope of multimedia communication supported by CPM is very broad.

CPM will support a wide range of discreet (e.g. messaging, files, applications) and continuous (e.g. full duplex voice, video) components. It supports the negotiation of initial components in a session, dynamic renegotiation of components in the session, and does not require any specific component to be part of the session (for instance, it is not mandatory to have a messaging component despite the name of the service). The session can be both person-to-person (2-party or multiparty) or person-to-service (and obviously person-to-person&service).

CPM supports a multi-device approach, making use of SIP convergence capabilities. It permits a user to share an identity between several devices and to use several identities per device. A user may have its CPM session shared between several of its devices on a media per media basis (e.g. video sharing on TV and voice on mobile). Session mobility between devices is also supported (e.g. ongoing session transferred from TV to mobile). The user can also define preferences on how CPM should address communication according to its devices (e.g. IMs should be sent only to mobile).

In summary, CPM supports both of the three axes I defined for an optimal exploitation of IMS capabilities: multimedia communication and user oriented convergence.

CPM supports conferencing through a variety of means supported by SIP and already used in services like PoC or IMS Messaging: sessions to ad-hoc groups (a user sends an INVITE to a group explicitly defined in the INVITE), to pre-defined groups (the INVITE is sent to a PSI identifying a group whose definition is stored in the network), and by adding participants to a session on the fly.

Interworking with non-CPM communication means is not limited to messaging. It also includes interworking with non-IMS voice, such as circuit-switched voice. This will be done by reusing current IMS/CS interworking components.

In addition, CPM supports a converged address book, converged in the sense that it is aimed at being shared by all the devices owned by the user. It also has an archiving functionality, able to store such things as messages, media objects and session histories. It interacts with presence in order to publish or access presence information for a user. CPM will also support web services towards application willing to use its services. An interesting feature is the possibility for users not to divulge their identity when using CPM, by using a nickname for instance.

The CPM architecture is quite straightforward:
- A CPM Client in the device supports CPM from a user perspective.
- A Converged Address Book component supports the address book for multiple devices.
- A Message and Media Storage component archives everything that needs to be archived.
- An Interworking Function supports interworking with non-CPM messaging solutions (voice interworking is supported through the IMS core network).
- A CPM User Prefs component interfaces with the user for CPM customization.
- The CPM Conversation Server supports multimedia sessions, and should in implementations look very similar to what I described here. Like PoC and IMS Messaging, it will be subdivided in a Participating Function dedicated to a specific user in the session (called Personal Multimedia Controller in my post on the subject) and a Controlling Function component supporting features shared by multiple users like conferencing (I called it Multimedia Focus in the same post). These SIP centric components will control media intermediaries for individual components in the multimedia session (I called them Media Mixers). Note that the specification does not mandate network intermediaries for every component, as it allows peer-to-peer media flows between devices when the operator's policies permit it.

Building block standardization approaches

Both specifications can claim (and actually do) a building block approach to standardization. However, there are significant differences between them.

CPM's approach is IMS-centric, as it intends to reuse IMS enablers like the interworking with the circuit-switched network for voice, presence, group management and to make generic and extend architecture patterns that were introduced with the specification of Push To Talk over Cellular and later reused for IMS Messaging (OMA SIMPLE IM).

On the other hand, Multimedia Telephony's approach is pre-IMS centric. The goal is to create within IMS building blocks which mimic pre-IMS voice-centric telephony, with the hope (illusion?) that a multimedia communication experience can be created through the reuse of these basic building blocks that totally ignore the capabilities of IMS.

The reader can make its own opinion on the advantages and drawbacks of both approaches.

For my part, if I was an operator, I would be very suspicious about suppliers coming with a story of a Multimedia Telephony server defined as an extension of a short-term Telephony Application Server, and would ask them about the positioning of this product with regards to CPM.

On the other hand, I would mandate from the potential suppliers of IMS Messaging products to provide a CPM-ready solution with a clear roadmap. Considering that IMS Messaging is a brand new IMS specification, it may be a big mistake to purchase in 2008 or 2009 a solution that has no clear path towards the next big thing: CPM.

Links to publicly available specifications:
OMA CPM: nothing as this is work in progress
Multimedia Telephony Requirements: TS 22.173
Multimedia Telephony Architecture: section 4.16 in TS 23.228 (the AS for Multimedia Telephony is unambiguously called TAS)
Multimedia Telephony Protocol Details: TS 24.173
Architecture for IMS Centralized Services: TS 23.292

Christophe

A Bulding Block Approach to Standardization

For decades, the telecommunications industry has standardized solutions from A to Z, with little if any reuse of existing specifications when creating new ones. The progressive migration from circuit switched to IP based services did not initially change this fact much: MMS or OMA IMPS (that I take as an example in this post) are typical examples of creating telco-specific standards based on a loose reuse of IETF ones (SMTP for MMS, HTTP for OMA IMPS).

This has changed with IMS, and more especially its SIP component. 3GPP and the IETF collaborate with each other, and needed extensions to the SIP protocol due to IMS requirements are under the control of the IETF.

By importing IETF specifications into telecom standards, 3GPP implicitly accepted the building block approach to specifications that is common place in the Internet domain. In this post I will try to describe this approach and its benefits.

Building block standardization of SIP

SIP is a textbook example of a building block approach to standardization. The people and groups in charge of specifying SIP constantly try to apply the following rules:
- Do not reinvent the wheel. Reuse and adapt existing specifications if they fulfill your requirements. Only create when needed.

- Make everything as generic as possible. Even if your requirements are very precise, try to make your solution generic enough to be reused for other requirements.

Here follow some examples of how this was applied to SIP standardization:

- SIP sessions make use of the Session Description Protocol (SDP), which was specified prior to SIP. In effect, it is possible to use SDP without SIP.

- SIP SUBSCRIBE and NOTIFY methods were initially created to support a very specific requirement, actually related to the telecom domain (the support of the telephony Automatic Call Back service with SIP). However, it was decided to make the concept a generic and extensible means to distribute event notifications in a SIP network through event packages (see the first draft for SUBSCRIBE/NOTIFY here). When a part of the IETF community decided to support presence through SIP, they simply had to reuse the event package specification and create two presence-specific event packages. While the requirement was initially very specific, it gave birth to a concept that is fundamental for SIP and constantly evolving through the creation of new event packages. It is actually remarkable that this is a telephony -related requirement that led to a SIP concept which opens the door to a large variety of non-telephony related applications of the protocol.

- In the Instant Messaging (IM) area, presence was initially no more than a single state, describing if a recipient could accept an IM. The IETF decision to support presence through the inclusion of an XML document in the body of SIP methods, and allowing extensions to the basic schema, permitted the definition of presence to be gradually extended to become a large set of information about users (or services), their communication means, terminals and applications.

- SIP PUBLISH was initially created specifically for a client to remotely update presence information. The first versions of the draft were tightly linked to the presence event package and made impossible the reuse of PUBLISH in different contexts (see the very first draft here). However, the IETF community rapidly ensured the possibility to reuse PUBLISH for all existing and future event packages. PUBLISH therefore contributed to the enrichment of SIP-based presence, but at the same time a requirement initially scoped to presence contributed to the enrichment of the whole SIP protocol.

- Instant Messaging through SIP was initially supported only through the creation of a new SIP method: MESSAGE. However, it rapidly emerged that this approach was far from optimal to support all potential requirements associated to instant messaging: the concept of chat, which embeds IMs in a specific dialog context, the need to potentially exchange large documents via IM (e.g. a video file) while SIP is a control protocol and not a transport one like HTTP, or the need to support potentially high IM traffic while a SIP infrastructure might not have been implemented with this purpose in mind. It took time and several tries for the IETF community to address these requirements, and the final decision was to reuse the concept of SIP session as well as another protocol to transport an IM within the session. As a protocol like HTTP was not optimal to support the requirements for this IM transport protocol, it was decided to specify a new one called MSRP. This decision makes the comparison between Jabber/XMPP and SIP to support IM very biased. Maybe Jabber/XMPP is a better protocol than SIP for IM. However, Jabber/XMPP was initially specified and optimized for it, making its extension for, say VoIP, far from straightforward. On the other hand, in a SIP context, IM can be perceived as one communication component among others in a multimedia session.

OMA IMPS vs. IETF Presence and IM

The vertical standardization mindset that still prevailed a few years ago in the telecom community can be illustrated with OMA IMPS (initially called Wireless Village), a mobile specification to support instant messaging, chat rooms and presence.

Instead of reusing IM and presence related protocols available in the Internet, the Wireless Village group decided to specify a client to server protocol and a server to server protocol that would be specific to the mobile telecom domain, just reusing HTTP as a semantic-less transport protocol for OMA IMPS commands.

The group also decided to define IM, chat rooms and presence as tightly coupled together from a protocol and an architecture perspective, and to tightly link presence information to the mobile context.

In order to support its requirements, the Wireless Village group had to define various kinds of user lists (or groups) serving different purposes. Instead of creating a generic user group concept, they decided that each group fulfilling a specific purpose was a distinct object. Consequently, each group object led to a set of specific commands in the protocol, for creating/deleting the group, adding/removing elements to it, etc. With such an approach, if you define, say 4 types of user groups and 6 management commands, you end up with 24 distinct commands in the protocol.

In comparison, to address similar objectives, the IETF decided to decouple various concerns.

While presence is a concept originated in an IM context, the IETF decoupled one from the other, permitting each to evolve independently, thus permitting presence to apply to a much broader scope than simply IM.

By reusing the SIP session concept for session-based IM, the IETF permitted both the implementation of IM-specific systems, and multimedia systems using IM as one component among others in a SIP session.

The approach to address user groups and associated management, specified in RFCs related to XCAP, followed this approach:

- A user group is a user group, no matter what it is used for. The same user group can serve different purposes, and the set of applications for user groups is not arbitrarily bounded.

- A user group is user data, and there might be other user data that require similar access and management. No need to specialize access and management methods to user groups.

Consequently, XCAP is an HTTP-based protocol defining a few data management methods. The data itself is specified in XML, and there exist specifications for these data being user groups. As one of the requirements associated to data management was to be able to notify a user about changes made to data, the IETF decided to use a SIP event package. In effect, the IETF specifications for user data management include the joint usage of XCAP and SIP.

Building block standardization approach in IMS

The building block mindset to specifications has spread to IMS and non IMS standardization into 3GPP.

For instance, despite a terminology which is heavily related to SIP sessions (e.g. CSCF - Call Session Control Function), the IMS core network can be seen as a SIP connectivity network able to route SIP signaling, whether it is session-related or not, within an IMS domain, across IMS domains, and between IMS and non-IMS SIP domains.

In this context, IMS Presence, Messaging, and Chat Rooms are implemented as independent applications on top of the IMS core network and that make use of it. Once again, the comparison with OMA IMPS is quite interesting:

- OMA IMPS specifications lead to an implementation based on a network of IMPS servers over the mobile IP network. An IMS implementation relies on deploying application servers on top of an IMS core network. The IMS core network directly supports some of the requirements that are supported vertically in the OMA IMPS specifications (and implementations), like user authentication or routing and interfacing between various operators' OMA IMPS networks.

- OMA IMPS specifications tightly link the concepts of IM, presence and user groups. On the other hand, IMS specifications treat each of them as independent enablers which can be used together or in different contexts.

- OMA IMPS specifications were totally under the control of the Wireless Village group, and then OMA. On the other hand, by reusing IETF specifications, IMS specifications directly benefit from the evolutions performed in the IETF community, including some originating from people and companies which do not belong in the telecom or IMS domains.

A quite similar comparison can be applied to MMS and the equivalent support through IMS messaging.

Another interesting example is the 3GPP Generic User Profile specification, which permits to provide a centralized and homogeneous access to user data actually residing in various locations (e.g. HLR, HSS, AuC, application servers) and normally accessed through a variety of protocols (e.g. MAP, Diameter, LDAP). At the beginning of the erratic standardization process for GUP, 3GPP intended to standrdize a specific GUP protocol as well as a specific GUP schema to describe user data. Later on, it was decided to align on the specifications for Liberty Alliance, which define web services permitting 3rd party service providers to access user data owned by the network operator. As a consequence, GUP can be used directly as the means to access user data in network databases to support the Liberty Alliance web services exposed to 3rd parties.

The GUP specifications were also made generic enough to clearly distinguish between the methods used to access and manage user data and the data itself, that needs to be specified by instantiating and extending the generic GUP schema. On the other hand, the GUP specifications also include a SOAP-based user data modification notification mechanism, which duplicates what SIP event packages can and do support for XCAP. However, one can argue that the usage scope of GUP is broader than IMS and cannot rely on a protocol that 3GPP only uses in the context of IMS.

Some advantages associated to building block standardization

Reusing existing specifications instead of defining them from scratch permits to speed up the standardization process.

A protocol component or an application performing a generic task can be implemented once and reused several times, leading to faster development and validation.

In some cases, building blocks can be re-arranged with others to create new solutions. I gave the example of session-based messaging which, by applying the concept of SIP session to instant messaging, permits to integrate IM as one component among others in a multimedia SIP session.

Christophe