IMS service plane enabled heterogeneous networks for multimedia applications

We discuss the design and implementation of an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) service plane enabled heterogeneous network. In the network the user profile management and multimedia application activities, such as users´ service subscription, authentication, authorization and provisioning are handled by a general IMS service plane. This service plane further interworks with lower layer network control plane functions to provide network admission control and QoS control for users on, e.g., EPON access network and optical networks. Furthermore, we have developed and evaluated a number of smart phone enabled services on this testbed over the same IMS core service functions and a set of application servers. Through these experiments, we demonstrated the feasibility of mobile-based service invocation and server-based orchestration, and investigated the usage of the service plane functions and control plane functions in service provisioning on Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) and smart phones.