Managing P2P services via the IMS

The key aim of our work was to illustrate the benefits and means to deploy P2P services via the IMS. Having demonstrated the technical viability of P2P-IMS we have also found a way to add a new management dimension to existing P2P systems. P2P-IMS comes with a natural "data management" mechanism, addressing the DRM problem which is still a major hurdle in existing P2P platforms. In P2P-IMS, the IMS manages user registration, authentication, and authorisation, as well as monitoring, charging and billing. The immediate benefit is that P2P-IMS can be used as a building block to deploy managed secure group communication services. By contrast to existing P2P systems, in P2P-IMS group members are authenticated securely. In this way it is possible to manage authorisation policies in P2P communication and data exchange.