An evaluation of transport layer Policy Control in the IP multimedia subsystem

The 3GPP IMS is a ubiqituous communications architecture that makes Internet technologies available to any user, anywhere and at any time. The success of IMS technology will depend heavily on customer uptake of services. Network operators need to justify charging for services that are typically freely available on the Internet - one way to do this is by introducing reliability through QoS provisioning. The IMS and service delivery platforms in general are topics of huge complexity, consequently testbeds will be necessary to expose these architectures to an open set of developers. This paper presents the UCT policy control framework a 3GPP compliant, open source and freely distributed architecture designed for QoS provisioning in the IMS. Important test scenarios and results are presented that investigate the network overhead and session setup delay introduced by such a policy control architecture.