MSF’s Ref 3 Architecture Brings IMS Into the Fold

The MultiService Forum (MSF) this week announces release 3.0 of the group’s architecture, the first iteration of the MSF’s work to address IMS.

While the MSF Ref 3 architecture addresses IMS, it is not pure IMS, so applies to both legacy and newer gear, explaied Jim McEachern, an MSF board member and the man in charge of Nortel’s carrier VoIP standards strategy.

Release 3.0 will be the basis for the Global MSF Interoperability (GMI) events planned in late October at a handful of locations around the globe. That will include a BT/Vodafone-hosted event at a BT lab in the United Kingdom.; a gathering at Verizon’s Waltham, Mass., site; a group at an NTT location in Japan; a KT-hosted get together in Korea; and work at the University of New Hampshire’s interoperability lab.

In all, there will be 26 vendors involved. GMI will test the interoperability of such devices as gateways, softswitches, session border controllers, application servers, media servers, bandwidth managers and more, McEachern said.

And since the IMS architecture is functional rather than physical, this has meant that the MSF has specified a number of new architectural components: the P-CSC (MSF), the I-CSC (MSF), the S-CSC (MSF), the HSS, and the subscription locator server. In addition, the R3 architecture introduces a new class of user terminal, the IMS-aware SIP UA.

“We have cases where CSCFs [IMS call session controllers] will serve clients remotely, on another continent,” McEachern said, “or [cases in which a] CSCF is serving an application server elsewhere.”

McEachern added the MSF IMS work, and the direction of the industry as a whole, is about decoupling services from the physical network and about distributed network. “That’s the whole idea behind this,” he said, adding that with IMS, geography no longer matters.

MultiService Forum (MSF) www.msforum.org

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