IMS rings the changes
The telecoms industry has been working to develop an
architecture that could bring together the increasingly complex elements within the network. And finally, with IMS, it may well be succeeding, claims Grant Lenehan
For the last twenty years or so, the creation of an infrastructure that could support a 'network of networks' has been the long-term vision of many industry bodies, service providers and vendors. The aim has long been to create an agnostic environment that allows users to interact with services, whenever and wherever they are. Initiatives such as the International Telecommunications Union's (ITU's) IMT2000 directive set the way, although the 2G and ISDN technologies that it was designed to use now look rather dated in the face of the overwhelming success of IP.
While technologies, regulatory conditions, and operators' business models have changed dramatically, overall industry objectives have not. Confronted by continually increasing complexity in devices, protocols and applications -- and by the need to inter-work across multiple network boundaries -- the telecoms community has been working hard to develop an architecture that could bring these together in the simplest way possible. And finally, with the IP Multimedia Sub-system (IMS), it may well be succeeding.
Mobile first
The mobile community has got there first with the IP Multimedia Sub-system, mainly as a result of the economic downturn that limited fixed network investment at the start of this decade. 3GPP, the main global co-ordinating body for 3G network development, initiated the work on IMS that would act as the standard for the converged core network of the future.
With many fixed network operators now starting to confront similar issues, IMS-based solutions are also becoming attractive to them as they face a future based on offering the 'triple play' of integrated voice, data and content services. In this context, IMS is expected to play a major role in driving the continued convergence between the fixed, mobile and wireless sectors, and greatly simplifying usability from the end user's perspective.
IMS is rapidly gathering pace, with some systems planned to go live in late 2005. One of the significant drivers for IMS adoption is its potential for rationalising the heterogeneous network and service infrastructures that have been inherited by multinational mobile operators as a result of the industry consolidation of recent years.
Particularly acute is the issue of continued inter-working with legacy PSTN and cellular infrastructures. Investment has been enormous over the last century around the world in both access and switching equipment and it will be impossible to completely replace this for many decades. In fact, significant growth is still underway in circuit-switched cellular networks. For this reason, inter-working between the two domains will remain an important issue for the foreseeable future.
If truly global brands are to be established, they must offer consistent services across networks and global boundaries. In reality, this consistency must extend to the methods by which services are created, delivered and managed. The use of a single and coherent -- yet highly distributed -- architecture is desirable if systems integration and legacy support costs are not to become unmanageable.
The previously 'flat' structure of traditional telecoms networks is being replaced by an open, layered model that allows the delivery of richer multimedia services to a variety of devices from a variety of sources. Future services are being built around IP as the transport protocol, supported by Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to control VoIP, and multimedia sessions and Diameter for handling customer authentication and billing procedures. Building on these, IMS has been designed to support other relevant protocols such as HTTP, Web services and Parlay, while also incorporating the work being done by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) in the applications layer.
All-packet core
At the heart of the IMS is an all-packet core that fully supports the ever-growing diversity of access technologies including 2G, 3G, WiFi and WiMax -- as well as the still largely open concept of '4G'. Supporting this, a number of other standards bodies are also developing appropriate extensions to allow IMS to inter-work with other access technologies such as xDSL, PacketCable (DOCSIS) and fibre in the local loop.
The primary purposes behind IMS are to enable a richer set of services, as well as facilitate the seamless convergence of all the communications services that we presently use -- but which are currently partitioned by the nature of the networks that they run on. While we've become used to using the fixed Internet for some transactions, our mobile handsets for others and so on, this silo concept is increasingly inefficient and expensive for both user and service provider.
Moving up the value chain
With traditional voice revenues under constant erosion, it's essential that service providers of all types are able to move up the value chain, away from basic connectivity and towards more advanced communications services that include multimedia, messaging, business and lifestyle applications. IMS has been specifically designed to allow this type of rich interaction between services, allowing users to set up voice or multimedia sessions on the fly, exchange content and messages in highly flexible ways, direct fixed line voicemails to mobile in-boxes, or use presence and availability information to direct calls to the most appropriate person within an enterprise.
IMS also supports the core next generation network objective of openness and transparency. On one hand, the presence of standards ensures that multi-vendor purchasing strategies can be pursued without an accompanying rise in integration overheads. On the other, commercial relationships with content and application owners and aggregators can be protected within a secure framework for both financial transactions, supported by underlying techniques to guarantee quality of service across multiple network and operational domains.
The changing role of industry standards within telecoms is particularly important here. In direct contrast to the IT industry, communications standards have generally emerged through consensus, facilitated by the workings of national and international industrybodies like the ITU. As the world's networks shift towards becoming open platforms, new technologies must be integrated at an ever-faster rate to achieve continued competitive advantage, placing a strain on increasingly fragile and multi-sector standards processes.
By providing what is, in effect, a common and open applications platform for both service providers and third parties to use, IMS goes a long way towards helping the telecommunications industry take its first steps towards becoming more commercial and even less utility based.
IMS will have an enormous impact on how the communications industry actually makes money in the future and, just as importantly, on how it will protect its traditional revenues from attack. While mobile service providers in particular have always been sensitive to the loss of revenues to third parties, they must reinvent themselves to add more value to transactions in a variety of ways to help both themselves and their business partners.
Opening up the value chain
IMS has a unique ability to open up the value chain while simultaneously allowing the network operator to retain control of certain essential value-added functions. Telcordia in fact, is concentrating much of its development on these 'value added' functions, often referred to by OMA as 'service enablers.' Since Telcordia believes in open ecosystems, and that a holistic approach is the best way to forward the objectives of IMS, we are actively contributing to the development of these specifications within OMA and 3GPP.
IMS supports a significant number of value-added functions both within the network and also within the business models that are the justification for the current interest in IMS. These functions all share the attributes of being common across most applications, and being far easier to implement within the network than hundreds or thousands of times within each application.
Firstly, there is presence and the availability information; with the network knowing whether users are available for calls and what device they are using at that particular moment, it becomes possible to offer premium services to both private and business customers that ensure that calls or transactions always get through to the appropriate person or device.
Then there is location information; if the network knows where the user is, a broad portfolio of location-specific services and applications can be offered to the customer, extending to special promotions in shopping areas or traffic and weather alerts. Here, IMS can be combined with the availability of GPS and other positioning technologies to finally make location-based services a commercial reality.
Security and risk management are also both important to operators; sensitivity to security vulnerabilities is finally becoming a serious issue for both business and private users and the emergence onto the scene of viruses that target mobile devices or the impact of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are hitting the headlines. For end users, the emergence of IMS means they can use the network in the knowledge that their data itself is secure from prying eyes.
Shared (or 'common') user data and profiles represent a valuable opportunity to simplify the development and usability of new services; service providers can extend and leverage the increasingly wide range of customer information that will be needed to support advanced services. It also opens the network to end users to express their own service preferences, order their own subscriptions and appear on specific group lists.
Then there's flexible charging. The highly diverse, multimedia nature of NGN services is about to revolutionise billing models, with service providers requiring almost infinite flexibility in how they package and price their services to meet ever smaller market niches and support far more complex relationships with third parties. IMS, with its well-defined session model and value-added functions, allows operators to add value, and also flexible methods to charge for services. Charging may, in fact, be the most significant difference between IMS networks and other, 'dumber' IP networks. IMS provides a framework to simplify all of these procedures, making it easier to associate particular service quality parameters with specific customers to create gold and silver service grades for example, or to rapidly create cross-charging and payment relationships with partners, such as TV programmes for televoting, or the original owners of brands and content, such as film studios.
Monetising every transaction
It's arguable that IMS could be interpreted as the 'IP Metering System' (IMS!), given its ability to track and charge for every conceivable transaction that takes place, irrespective of whether this is via standard credit or prepaid systems, or through service-specific micro-payments. This helps communications service providers and network owners to retain their market dominance and opens up bandwidth for the flow of money, as well as data, once the services themselves have been created. Of course, the next-generation charging systems must take advantage of IMS' inherent flexibility -- legacy systems in IMS will simply become barriers to innovation.
In fact, service creation was often a problematic area in the days of Intelligent Networks, but IMS is allowing the drag-and-drop creation of new, multi-network and multi-protocol services and applications by non-technical staff, driving the rapid low cost prototyping and introduction of new services. In turn, the revenue opportunities created by IMS are transparently apparent to the operator.
That is because, as IMS at the heart of both the network and the service environment, data can be readily gathered from a multitude of network elements, end devices and third parties to produce clarity in billing and associated reconciliation procedures.
If much of the IMS flight path remains clouded in commercial confidentiality, it is becoming clear that there are two areas where it could have a major impact: in fixed-mobile-wireless convergence, and the area of discovering more about how subscribers use services.
Firstly, in the area of convergence, major operators such as BT are examining the role of IMS as a tool to offer truly 'joined up' services to customers, allowing them to roam freely between fixed, WiFi and cellular networks both at home and in public. One important issue here lies in allowing customers to connect in the most appropriate way for the service required at the optimum cost -- but through a single account and customer profile.
Secondly, in terms of discovering more about service usage, and adding to work done by the OMA, the part of IMS dedicated to supporting customer details and preferences might be accelerated to enhance data, messaging and virtual operator services by providing a much richer, more personalised experience. This in turn, can help drive take up of advanced services by online communities, increasing both revenues and brand loyalty.
The ultimate implementation
However IMS is ultimately implemented by each individual service provider, it's clear that its impact is going to be truly transformational in the business process and operations areas. It is, however, going to bring a need for reassessment in several key areas.
With quality of service, it will no longer be possible to take a simple, deterministic view of service quality based purely on a few connectivity-based, network-centric parameters. This prescriptive approach will have to be replaced by far more flexible and dynamic methods that can aggregate multiple sources of quality of service data, based more on the customer's actual experience of a transaction.
Quality of service issues are magnified by the fact that communications will increasingly take place across different commercial and technological domains, only a few of which may be actually owned by the primary service provider. Protecting both the integrity of the service and of the service provider, without any direct control over the entire length of the value chain, will present challenges for technologists, business development specialists and lawyers.
Now that the long awaited 'network of networks' looks like it's finally emerging from the complex cat's cradle of co-existing and often competing technologies and protocols that have grown up in recent decades, it's important to remember that IMS is there as a true business enabler.
The invention of money revolutionised entire economies and social structures, replacing the inevitable time and space limitations imposed by bartering. By comparison, IMS is set to open up the communications environment to new ways of doing business. In the process, new value -- and new wealth -- will be created. n
Grant Lenahan is Vice President, Wireless Mobility, Telcordia, and can be contacted via tel: +1 732 699 4894; e-mail: glenahan@telcordia.com
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