PROJECT OVERVIEW

The IMS ARCS research project was conceived as a means of bringing together a group of academic institutions lead by TSSG, to work with a number of companies in the telecommunications field with a particular interest in the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). The companies bring their commercial experience and market knowledge; the academic group bring their research & development skills and knowledge of leading edge technology and trends. Together, through discussions and the application of respective expertise, innovative new product concepts, prototypes and processes for developing future applications are created. The output from the project, such as prototype code and documents, is freely available to all members of the project to develop and commercialise, and after a period of time will eventually become open source and publicly available.

IMS ARCS is funded by Enterprise Ireland. The Project has been running since June 2007 and is due to finish in December 2009.

 PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION

IMS ARCS is an industry lead research project, where a number of academic groups, lead by TSSG, work with a number of industrial partners to perform research work focused on creating Intellectual property and expertise in the area of IMS. The IP is accessible to and shared equally by all project stakeholders.

The initial objective of the project was to focus on end user and enabling services for IMS, by developing a number of end user service concepts and then to analyse these under a number of headings, including value proposition, service functionality and implementation requirements. This would then be followed by the development of a number of working service prototypes which would be deployed on the Fraunhofer Fokus OpenIMS testbed.

However as the project evolved it became apparent that a further objective would be to create a general architecture for both enabling and end user services, and that a number of exemplar services would be created to demonstrate the architecture, its utility and reusability, along with providing a compelling value proposition. A further valuable output from the project is the documentation of development experience such as the software tools and processes used to develop IMS services and related areas such as the testing and deployment of these services.

A further high level objective of the project is the creation of a national centre of excellence in IMS technology, providing consultancy in this area and promoting Ireland as a competency centre for IMS through dissemination and marketing. It also includes the setup of a world class IMS test environment which will be operated by TSSG, and which will be accessible by companies developing IMS focused products.

The project performed Service concept analysis on twenty five essentially different end user services for IMS analysing  them under a number of headings including value proposition, technical feasibility, various intellectual property issues such as patentability, legal issues (such as privacy considerations), deployment, potential market and charging model. This analysis has been made available to the stakeholders, some of whom have used it as a source of ideas and as a template for evaluating potential services,

• Several of the aforementioned services have been developed to prototype level and demonstrated at various tradeshows and conferences such as the MWC 2008, TridentCom 2009 and the IMS World Forum 2009.
• A test suite for verifying the OpenIMS setup and functionality was developed and distributed to stakeholders, allowing them a means of verifying their own private OpenIMS core setup.
• A VMWare image, called the “IMS ARCS Jumpbox” was developed and distributed to stakeholder on a DVD. This consisted of a linux OS, OpenIMS testbed, various software and tools such as Apache ServiceMix, Sailfin app server, Java, Maven, Subversion, eXists XML database and the IMS ARCS code base. This gave stakeholders a complete IMS development kit and the various services and code developed for IMS ARCS, which would run out of the box, without any setup, thus allowing interested parties to get up to speed on IMS development very quickly.
• A number of technical workshops and OpenIMS training sessions were given to stakeholders.
• A general architectural framework for end user services and enabling services has been developed by the project and this can be reused across many future applications. This is documented in various functional specifications that are stored in the project document repository. The project has also created a user guide to IMS development which documents the project’s experiences with IMS development and the software tools and processes adopted during the project.

Refereed Academic Papers

• Irish Human Computer Interaction 2008  - Where Does User Centred Design Fit In An Industrial Academic Research Programme?
• E-Challenges 2008 - IMS ARCS - An Industrial Academic Cooperative research program for IMS
• ICT Mobile Summit 2009 - A General Architecture for Enabling and End User services in IMS.
• Manweek 2009 - An Architecture for IMS Services Using Open Source Infrastructure

   

 

 

 

 

Partner List:

Academic
Telecommunications software & Systems Group, WIT

Athlone Institute of Technology

Interactive Design Centre, University of Limerick

NUI Maynooth

Industrial

3PlayPlus
Accuris
Aceno
Adaptive Mobile
Alcatel-Lucent

Anam

CONTACT

Project Manager:  Rober Mullins

Emial:  rmullins@tssg.org  

Tel: +353 51 302964

Fax: + 353 51 302901