Summary
This analysis discusses some concerns about IMS and SIP-based UC interoperability, and highlights a possible approach to address related challenges.
Analysis
IMS (IP-based Multimedia Subsystem) is a concept for common service architecture underlying both wireless and wireline networks. With IMS, telcos, mobile operators and other service providers will be able to rapidly develop many new applications and multimedia services and then deliver them quickly across next-generation packet-switched networks and traditional circuit-switched networks, including mobile networks (GSM, 3G) and the upcoming, fully-packetized 4G mobiles (WiMAX, LTE).
The great expectations for the IMS service architecture are that service providers, after making large infrastructure investments, will enjoy the ability to rapidly develop and deploy new services and hence quickly reap new business opportunities and achieve lower operational costs without disturbing existing services.
Both IMS and UC (Unified Communications) heavily rely on SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), so at first glance it would appear that UC applications and services would have no problem meshing or running over IMS-based networks.
The ultimate concern may not be over whether IMS is “friendly” to SIP-based UC, but whether the final global IMS network infrastructure will be sufficiently robust in terms of capacity, security, stability, availability and overall reliability, to deal with high bandwidth UC applications running in both landline and mobile environments. Improved service availability for VoIP and UC services are needed, involving new processes to maximize the uptime of additional and perhaps more exotic services such as video streaming from mobile to-and-from desktop (and perhaps set-top) devices.
