The IMS Lantern: Contribution

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

A Contribution from the Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS

Here is a first external contribution coming from the renowned Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS in Berlin. You will also find the main links featured in this post on the right side of the main page.

Here are excerpts from the email I received from Peter Weik:

My name is Peter Weik and I am working with the Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS in Berlin, Germany, an independent R&D organization for applied research in the telecommunications space. We have here been developing with own IMS prototypes and commercial IMS components now for several years in the context of the FOKUS Open IMS Playground (www.open-ims.org) in a true multi-vendor environment (www.open-ims.org/partner) for showing not only IMS interoperability (long before the first IMS interop events popped up) but also concepts around it (like e.g. application development or benchmarking of IMS components).

As you were asking in the latest post for links on what could be done, that exploit what IMS and SIP can offer to deliver innovative services I had to take on that opportunity as one of the lead developers of an open source project ;)

Well, you could spread the word even more via a blogpost that there is a free open source solution out there that has already enabled many IMS testbeds and developers: the Open IMS Core (www.openimscore.org).

The Open IMS Core is an implementation of IMS Call Session Control Functions (CSCFs) and a lightweight Home Subscriber Server (HSS), which together form the core elements of all IMS/NGN architectures as specified today within 3GPP, 3GPP2, ETSI TISPAN and the PacketCable initiative. The four components are all based upon open source software(e.g. the SIP Express Router (SER) or MySQL) and are available under the GPLv2. (You may know the project since it is also in the The March 2007 special issue of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine on IMS, just three articles further onwards.) The whole idea behind the project is to enable IMS developments and to help an industry to adopt IMS concepts - all of it without huge investments necessary.

Besides sparking the development of two also freely available IMS clients (the IMS Communicator and the UCT IMS Client), it has also enabled some industry players, universities and R&D departments (see www.openimscore.org/quotes) and is used in current IMS interop events (e.g. at University of New Hampshire, http://www.iol.unh.edu/services/testing/voip/equipment.php#IMS).

But of course we are also looking at own application prototype developments as part of our recently started Open SOA Telco Playgroundxggveqt (www.opensoaplayground.org). What is possible with IMS was shown at our last IMS workshop in November 2007 with the IMS Community Mashup with Facebook (http://youtube.com/watch?v=b1OwDD6cyBY).

Christophe

Who I Am

My name is Christophe Gourraud.

I am French and France is the country I currenly live in, after having worked in Canada and in Switzerland.

I have worked for several telecommunications equipment providers and one operator. Involved in 3GPP standardization for IMS and working as a systems architect, I had for years the opportunity to develop ideas about how to use the IMS in an innovative manner. This blog was one of the outlets I used to express these ideas to the telecommunications community. During these years I filed 24 patents for two companies, wrote articles, spoke to conferences and delivered courses.

I am now a student again, having started in September 2014 an Advanced Master in Innovation & Transformation at Ecole Centrale Paris. I have the desire to help companies innovate and transform themselves.

In the next year I will be looking for a job in this complex domain, in the telecommunications sector or outside. So do not hesitate to contact me if you think I may be the right person for your company.

IEEE Article

The March 2007 special issue of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine on IMS features an article I wrote, which is entitled: Using IMS as a Service Framework.

You can order the whole issue or my article.

Here is the introduction of the article:

The eventual value of IMS will be tightly linked to the number, variety and stickiness of services it will support, as well as its ability to accommodate various business models. An operator having invested in IMS should seek to make optimal use of it, which implies not arbitrarily limiting IMS to specific types of services, specific ways to implement them, or specific business models.

IMS should eventually take part in many services related to communication, content and data, not only as the host of some of these services, but also as a mediator and an added-value contributor to services delivered by 3^rd parties possibly located in the Internet.

This article aims to describe, thanks to a few examples, some of the interesting features IMS can offer as a service framework: not just a framework on which new services can be implemented, but also a framework with which numerous existing and future services can be integrated (see the IMS integration tips in the next sections).

The following sections describe the IMS service framework around the three following topics: the capabilities of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) as a service control protocol; IMS service addressing and routing features and the new application layer architecture they can support; the ability of IMS to combine service logic distributed among multiple entities.