Currently most of the European Operators are building first IMS Systems as internal playgrounds for prototyping and know how aggregation, and are predominantly focusing on platform architecture and service design from a backend / service integration perspective.
As a large scale IMS roll-out is facing significant hurdles within the Telco industry in terms of huge platform investments standing vis-à-vis a relatively small expected direct return of invest based on new service revenues, we assume that this investment can only be leveraged when IMS based FMC can, beside others, support achieving three strategic goals:

1. Commercially offered IMS approaches must - from day one - leverage the market potential e.g. for a mobile operator of enabling its subscribers to make (high value voice- and video-) calls to fixed line consumer electronic devices like Set Top Boxes and Home-gateways and vice versa in case of a fixed line operator. In addition, the hybrid IMS / SIP client should support a set of commercially relevant service scenarios.
2. Operators can provide a seamless and consistent user experience / look & feel for services across all device classes (including consumer electronics devices in the Triple Play Arena) as a major element of customer retention. This is also seen as a key factor to differentiate against freely available and cost free VoIP clients.
3. Operators should have the possibility to remotely update, roll out and maintain IMS client applications and framework components.

The IMS client frameworks have not been studied in depth and there are no well defined or standardised IMS clients available that provide portability, interoperability and the development of rich IMS applications in a fixed-mobile convergent environment.

What are the main objectives of this Project?

This study will address IMS clients on a variety of heterogeneous end devices, e.g. mobile devices, PCs, Set Top boxes, Home Gateways, game consoles, IP telephone handsets, etc. It is aiming to raise awareness among Telco operators to actively influence and lead standardisation and deployment of the IMS client framework. The figure shows the IMS Client Framework. The parts in yellow depict the areas in scope of this study.

The objectives of this study are:

• Analysis of market prospects,
• Definition and analysis of service scenarios,
• Identification of relevant technical and commercial requirements affecting IMS services,
• A functional specification of an open and extensible IMS Client Framework by defining an IMS client control layer functionality. It includes the functional architecture for different device classes. The operational and deployment aspects for the Telco operators will be described.