The setup of national IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) testbed - approach and challenges

IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) defines a unified framework that enables convergence of voice, video, data and mobile network technology over an IP-based infrastructure. It is regarded as the standard service delivery platform for providing multimedia applications in the next generation network (NGN). Despite all the hypes, the adoption, support and interest on IMS are still protracted among operators, service providers, device manufacturers and developers. We believe one of the main reasons for the delay is that these parties felt uncertain on IMS over the setup cost, and were generally trapped in a vicious circle, where one party depends on another to initiate and commit their support on IMS. As the national research institute in Malaysia, we have taken the challenge to break the vicious circle, and committed to build and provide an IMS Center of Excellence (CoE) as testbed for all parties to conduct their application development, experiments and interoperability tests. This paper describes the objectives and benefits of establishing our IMS testbed, our approach to break the vicious circle, the formation and responsibility of an NGN/IMS workgroup (WG), and the specifications and focus of our IMS testbed.