Industry Team Advances Wireless IP Communications Through Design of an Advanced Mobile Communications Architecture

Industry Team Advances Wireless IP Communications Through Design of an Advanced Mobile Communications Architecture

Verizon , together with key telecom industry suppliers, today announced a vision for the advancement of next-generation network architecture for wireless mobile telecommunications networks. Dick Lynch, Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer at Verizon Wireless, said the company has been working for nearly a year with a task force of the industry’s “best and brightest” network engineers and strategists from Cisco, Lucent Technologies, Motorola, Nortel and Qualcomm. Their goal has been to develop enhancements to a well known, emerging architecture, known as IMS (IP Multi-media Subsystem).

The multi-vendor team has generically termed this architecture A-IMS – for Advances to IMS — in order to reflect its evolution from work done earlier in technology standards bodies. The A-IMS architecture developed by the task force provides solutions to implement next-generation services in current networks, as well as creates a foundation for the efficient roll-out of both SIP- and non-SIP-based services in future networks.

IMS is generally accepted as a core component of virtually all next-generation, IP-based communications networks for SIP-based applications, and is designed to assure standardization of multi-media services across all of these interconnected networks.

Lynch said, “We applaud the visionaries who have done a great job developing IMS over the last few years. But as we approached implementation planning, it became apparent that there are some practical, real-world issues that need to be addressed if we are to transparently and completely deploy and maximize the use of this new architecture. To us, it is also important that it be built to support the bridging of the present non-IP reality as we transition to the future. As people look at what our task force has accomplished, I expect that they will see significant benefits, including embedding VoIP hooks into the lower levels of the stack and addressing security issues in a more systemic way. These are exciting advancements that are headed rapidly into our mainstream technology roadmap.”

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