UNH Interoperability Lab, IMS Forum Plan IMS Plugfest
By Bob Wallace
December 13, 2006

In a major move to bring the rubber of the promising IMS architecture to the road for service providers, the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) said Wednesday it will host the first IP Multimedia Subsystem Forum (IMSF) group test next month.

The IMS Forum said Empirix, Sonus Networks, Tekelec, Genband, Trendium and GlobalTouch Telecom, have already committed to participating in the plugfest.

The focus of the event, the first of several planned, will largely be on IMS application servers, which will play a key role for service providers delivering new services and features to their customers. Established in 1988, UNH-IOL said it provides neutral third-party interoperability and conformance testing for data communications companies.

"A crucial aspect to the IMS architecture is working to have vendor interoperability using real-life applications and services," said Lincoln Lavoie, a senior engineer at the lab. "Operators have said that they need to be able to select applications best suited to their customer base. To this end, the IMS Forum at UNH-IOL will be testing the interfaces between the IMS core network and the application servers."

As described by UNH, the IMS architecture allows service providers to deploy advanced messaging and multimedia features over a combination of mobile and wired/wireless networks. Scheduled for January 15-19, the IMS Plugfest will be the first in a series of test events that will increase in complexity over time.

“The IMS Plugfest represents a significant milestone in the Forum's mission to accelerate the deployment of IMS by resolving critical interoperability issues, developing best practices, and showcasing standards-based architectures in the application layer,” said IMS Forum Chairman Michael Khalilian. “IMS adoption and development is still in its nascent stages, and many questions remain. The IMS Forum Plugfest represents the ideal setting in which to clarify the ambiguity surrounding this emerging standard.”

UNH said the event covers both mobile and fixed line IMS applications targeting enterprises and consumers. Companies developing IMS solutions are invited to attend, as are test equipment vendors developing tools for the IMS architecture.

The first event will focus on testing the interfaces between the IMS architecture core network and application servers. This will include analyzing the north-south interfaces of the IMS architecture over several different IMS core/application server/user equipment combinations. The event will allow for the development of a multivendor reference IMS test bed that will be used as a baseline throughout the series of events.