Starting on 16 October five of the world’s heavyweight operators – BT, Korea Telecom, NTT, Verizon and Vodafone – will kick off the Global MultiService Forum Interoperability 2006 (GMI 2006) event. With participation from the testing and research facilities at UNH-IOL and ETRI and 27 solutions vendors, and sponsorship from Nortel, GMI 2006 is billed as the industry’s first multinational, distributed, interactive test event that will verify key interoperability aspects of a practical Next Generation Network/IP Multimedia Subsystem (NGN/IMS) implementation.

The MSF reports that with a global network connecting labs on three continents, GMI 2006 is in effect the first massive ’real network’ trial of the MSF Release 3 IMS compatible architecture announced on 12 September - the first industry specification to describe physical implementations of IMS-enabled devices in real-world deployment scenarios that explicitly include first-generation VoIP soft switches, PSTN interworking and evolution to a true IMS network. “The devil is in the details, and we are proud of our work in creating more than twenty Implementation Agreements that support the Release 3 architecture” comments Roger Ward, Office of the CTO, British Telecom and MSF president.

Ward describes the event’s five increasingly demanding test scenarios, starting with a nomadic subscriber in a single domain, and progressively building up to eventually demonstrate roaming between networks, with value-added services based on the Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) and Parlay/OSA applications. Several of the GMI scenarios address IMS interconnection between subscribers in the MSF R3 domain and ‘pure’ IMS domain as peer IMS networks. The final GMI 2006 scenario apparently represents the future reality of converged fixed and mobile IMS networks - demonstrating interoperability between a variety of networks at different stages of evolution and operated by a variety of carriers. This final scenario brings together all the topics addressed by the MSF over the last few years including – the support of roaming plus value added services between MSF R3 and pure IMS networks.

Building on earlier work that culminated in GMI 2004 (click), the MSF Release 3 Architecture refines the definition of key MSF Release 2 elements such as the Session Border Controller and also introduces a new class of user terminal, the IMS-aware SIP UA. According to the MSF, by taking account of both the 3GPP IMS architecture and existing deployed core network wireline VoIP systems, the MSF R3 specification reflects the reality of wireless-wireline convergence today and in the foreseeable future.

According to Ward issues that will be on the MSF’s agenda after GMI 2006 include a unified, practical approach to QoS, standardised reliability and resiliency mechanisms, advanced applications and services, fully specified carrier interconnection, interface certification, overload control in a highly distributed architecture, and IPTV. Some of this probably represents an overlap with the ‘freelance’ efforts of the Advances to IMS (A-IMS) initiative mounted by Verizon and five collaborators in July (click).

Interviewed at the NetEvents European Press Summit in Portugal last week, Ward also said that the MSF was talking to a commercial laboratory about setting up a certification process.
John Williamson