Building an IMS Client test bed with open source tools

Requirements are growing faster than ever. Keeping a product in sync with ever growing requirements is a big challenge and IMS is a classic example for the above statement. 3GPP IMS standards are evolving and the client side requirements bulge every month. It is important to ensure an IMS client is tested during the time of development with a platform that simulates the IMS network. As it is an expensive preposition to rely on operator's live network for testing and a live network cannot simulate error conditions, an IMS client test bed becomes essential. This paper explains our experiences in using open source elements like OpenIMSCore, OpenIKEv2, Strongswan, Open Sigcomp and SIPp to build an IMS client test bed. This paper describes vividly, a test bed that can be used to test an IMS client across usecases that include simple 3GPP call flow, call flow with signaling compression, call flow over TLS, call flow with security and a call flow from a device behind NAT with STUN server. The test bed is built to accommodate IMS clients operating on varied access types like LAN, GPRS/EDGE/UMTS and Wi-FiM_trade.