You’ve probably already heard about IMS (and no, I am not referring to the Institute of Mathematical Statistics), and if you haven’t it’s about time!
In a way, IMS is all we ever wanted out of a communication system but were always afraid to ask for. It can handle services – intelligent ones, which traverse through several, different application servers. It can do billing. It is flexible. But it is also complex. Very complex. And at the heart of it there’s SIP – the text-based VoIP signaling protocol.
In its present state, IMS requires a large set of protocols. For SIP alone you will need SigComp, and Offer-Answer model, and Preconditions and P-headers, and new authentication and authorization mechanisms. And that’s not all. Since this requires a huge amount of work, the industry has come up with a new term for “wannabe IMS” companies that are currently deploying SIP and want to migrate to IMS: “IMS-ready.” By calling their products “IMS-ready,” what are they really trying to tell us? “Well, I have SIP, and I really want to do IMS… and since SIP is part of IMS, I am ‘IMS-ready.’” This means that sometime in the future they will get around to developing all those nasty IMS components that are missing.
If you think that this is all there is to it, then you’re quite wrong! If you have an IMS-compliant (NOT “IMS-ready”) solution on a SIP IMS User Agent (that’s a client), you also have a lot of applications running there. These can be VoIP, Video over IP, PoC (Push-to-X), Presence, Instant Messaging and maybe more. Each one of these is a world of its own, with a set of rules that are specifically tied to large number of standards – some of which are not even finalized! So your world as a client developer is a rather challenging one indeed!
How can a frazzled client developer possibly stay on top of all this? You can join the IMTC IMS Activity Group – a new “home away from home” especially for IMS client developers.
For years, the IMTC has been working on interoperability of multimedia technologies. I have been a part of this myself, as a co-chairman of the 3G-324M AG (Activity Group) for several years – in the good old days when video on 3G handsets was only in its infancy. Our 3G-324M AG has done some great things, and we still are, making sure that new handsets can talk to one another with video over circuit switched connections.
Now the IMTC has decided to open a new Activity Group to deal specifically with IMS interoperability issues on the client side – to help all those mobile handsets, wireless PDAs and wireline phones that want to be IMS clients. Not “IMS-ready” – IMS-compliant.
The bottom line: If you are doing IMS, and you are developing clients, the IMS AG, is the place for you. I’m the co-chairman and I can tell you that companies like Ericsson, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung are already there. So come and join us!
No comments:
Post a Comment