Service delivery platforms in practice [IP Multimedia Systems (IMS) Infrastructure and Services]

There is considerable work in defining an architectural framework that supports multimedia service delivery. The IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) is a recent standards initiative that outlines a service delivery platform (SDP) architecture. In practice, however, a number of service delivery platforms already were developed and commercially deployed. The existing implementations focus on the IT systems and domain for service design and delivery and accommodate the existing network implementations in their architectures. Such solutions may be viewed as IT-based designs whereas the newer emerging IMS standards provide greater detail on network element design. We have studied several IT-based service delivery platforms presenting longitudinal results from their deployment, including multimedia service usage, transaction demands, and external applications deployed. These characteristics may be used to further refine IMS based service delivery platforms by accommodating some of the functional characteristics supported in successful IT-based SDP systems. We present a consolidated set of SDP capabilities to meet this objective