Transitioning to a global NGN is a massive task. Although interoperability is based on industry standards, physical implementations need to be tested in meaningful networked scenarios within and between labs in order to replicate real-world implementations prior to deployment. That's the primary role of the MSF.   

 

The MSF (MultiService Forum (News - Alert)) started interoperability testing of next-generation network (NGN) gateways and softswitches in 2002, followed by SIP servers in 2004 and the IMS core in 2006. At each event the MSF formulated ‘real world’ networked test scenarios. As NGN technology has matured, these scenarios have increasingly reflected the growing recognition of IMS’s role in network service integration.

 

These scenarios formed the basis of GMI 2008:  

The relatively long interval between these events indicates the size of the task. GMI 2008 (Global MSF Interoperability) involved five major carriers based in China, Europe and the US as well as twenty-two vendors. Other key stats: 225 devices were tested, there were nearly 500 test permutations, over 600 pages of test plans and around 125 test engineers worked around the clock during the twelve days of the event.

 

Roger Ward, President of the MSF: “In GMI 2008, interoperability testing is conducted first within each lab, and then between labs, for each of the six test scenarios. With so many results to collate, a customized test capture tool had to be developed specifically for this event, giving the MSF a unique capability to capture, automatically aggregate, and analyze globally distributed test results.”

 

The results will be published in a white paper and, as illustrated below, they will also be fed back to the relevant standards bodies.

 

 

 

 

 

End-to-end session control is the baseline scenario on which all the others are built, which means that it’s important but not wildly exciting. IPTV, however, is a hot topic that is enabled by this scenario.

 

For GMI 2008 the MSF partnered with the ATIS (News - Alert) IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF) to drill down into the details of IPTV implementations. In this case the tests built on early work that defined numerous MSF and IIF specifications that provide the foundation stacks on which IPTV services can be built. Without a robust foundation / architecture service providers do not have a meaningful, deployable solution, but once that architecture is well defined and supported by vendors, then implementing the actual service becomes a relatively easy process.

 

A key objective was to go through this process, to validate the QoS metrics and the associated test equipment so that service providers can be more confident that the measured performance translates into the requisite customer QoE. This was the first time that standardized IPTV was put to the test in a network context in order to validate automatic configuration of set top boxes.

 

 

IMS has been overhyped, trashed and wildly misunderstood. And along the way the focus has shifted, e.g. from an architecture to a platform to a SIP application server. 
 

Mark Wegleitner, Verizon (News - Alert) senior VP of technology: “The work being done during GMI 2008 is laying the groundwork for enormous change in the consumption of information in any format from any network on any equipment, anywhere. IMS is more than a platform; it is a system that will enable the true convergence of services, using some very dynamic blends of network and Internet functions.”

 

One obvious blend is the integration of IMS with Web-based services, which was the focus of one of the scenarios. It was designed to test the capability for carriers to access a virtually unlimited range of services for a public that is increasingly demanding the full richness of Web services both at home and on the move.

 

 

The breadth and depth of GMI 2008 is impressive, but more work is needed to guarantee the successful deployment of all services and enable the rapid service creation and deployment that end users will require. It will facilitate significant service functionality such as QoS, IPTV and location management, but increasingly it will be the blend of network functionality and Net-centric service functionality that will prevail.