An Open IMS Testbed for exploring Wireless Service Evolution and Network Architecture Evolution towards SAE and LTE

Modern telecommunication networks and classical roles of operators are subject to fundamental changes. Standardization bodies and Industry are specifying and integrating next generation network (NGN) infrastructures and NGN services based on an all IP paradigm. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), 3GPP2 and Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) are working on technological issues to enable services using Internet technology and service orientated architectures (SOA). Furthermore, first thoughts on the architectural and bearer evolution of NGN is taking place under the notion of long term evolution (LTE) and system architecture evolution (SAE). This paper reports about our approach of extending the existing IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) Playground @ FOKUS towards a LTE/SAE testbed and two prototypic services, a single network agnostic voicemail application and a 3G circuit-switched to packet-switched handover scenario as a proof-of-concept for the environment.