Euro Innovation
by Bob Emmerson
IMS Gets Real at
GMI 2006
Will IMS bring about the greatest change in the communica-
tions infrastructure since the invention of the packet? It’s be-
ginning to look that way.

GMI 2006, the world’s first glob- al interoperability event for IMS and FMC, involved six operators and 197 devices. GMI stands for Global MSF Interoperability, and MSF is the MultiService Forum. Now that we have gotten a double dose of acronyms out of the way, let’s look at the numbers.

The objective of the exercise was the creation of a test bed for the full spectrum of hardware, processes, and services needed to assemble an effective next-generation delivery platform. Topics addressed included roaming, quality of service (QoS), session border control and bandwidth management, and interoper-

ability with 3GPP release 4.

The event took 18 months to plan; it lasted two weeks and involved 98 test cases spread over eight scenarios. Scenarios ranged from a nomadic subscriber in a single domain to a full-scale test including value-added services and roaming over multiple domains (including cellular and WiFi). Vodafone’s Dan Warren describes the latter as “the mother of all IMS scenarios.”

As illustrated in figure 1, six vendors took part: BT, Vodafone, Verizon, Korea Telecom, and NTT Japan as well as the University of New Hampshire. Equipment came from 26 vendors, and there were nearly 1,000 pages of test specifications to

be worked through in two long weeks.

The testing and monitoring solutions came from Spirent and Empirix. The former provided test coverage for the IMS access and core network as well as the PSTN. The latter supplied IP and TDM call generation as well as visualization of signaling and voice quality problems.

Roger Ward, President of the MSF, says, “It will take time to distill the conclusions of a test as complex as this. However, using a new real-time test data capture tool developed for this event, we are confident that we will be able to release the full report on December 1, 2006–just before ITU World Telecom.”

By the time this article appears, those results will be out, but the mood was decidedly upbeat. Early results from the first three scenarios indicated that the rollout of interoperable services could start. That

International Focus

Figure 1: Interoperability tests were conducted over a BT Global Services network as well as the academic networks of Abilene, APAN-JP, GEANT, GEMnet, JANET, and KOREN.