Implementation of an IMS Testbed for Wired and Wireless Clients

Rapid growth and evolution in the area of telecommunications has compelled the network operators to provide seamless integration of all communication applications on a single system. In these circumstances IMS has established itself as a foundation for future wireless and wireline convergence. It provides an opportunity to build an open IP based service platform that will enable an easy and efficient deployment of new multimedia communication services mixing telecom and data services. As 3GPP IMS standards are in their evolving state it becomes very essential to test IMS clients during their development on a platform that simulates the IMS network. IMS client test bed also let the developers to test all error conditions which are not possible on a live. Moreover, it is an expensive deal to use an operator´s live network for testing purpose. Aim of this paper is to discuss an efficient architecture for IMS and our experience of building an IMS client test bed using open source elements like OpenIMScore. The test bed is built to accommodate IMS clients operating on varied access types like LAN, GPRS/EDGE/UMTS and Wi-Fi.