BSS/OSS Vendors Plug Into IMS Forum

Lincoln Lavoie, vice-chair of the technical working group at the IMS Forum, said the intent for the BSS/OSS component of the event was to examine the interfaces that are used to collect charging data about sessions and events from the network.

So through testing, participants exposed BSS and OSS interfaces to a number of services including triple play, VoIP, fixed mobile convergence from multiple vendors. They also validated test and measurement equipment, SIP, Class-5 features, DIAMETER IMS stacks, and instant messaging with presence support.

Including back office components into the interoperability process could hardly have waited much longer. According to OSS Observer, the forecast for real-time charging systems will grow from $2.9 billion this year to $4.4 billion by 2012 (Figure 1.) It is unlikely that the market can grow at such a pace without the accelerated deployment of IMS and pre-IMS architectures. The reverse also is true: It is unlikely that IMS can reach its potential without incorporating interoperable real-time charging.

Real-time charging is not new — obviously, by the $2.6 billion it generated last year — but one of the reasons it is so important to include it in the plugfest process is that the charging process itself is changing. Mostly, it is scaling.

Sixty-nine percent of real-time charging solutions support IN-based systems such as pre-paid platform, according to HP. By the time the market reaches that $4.4 billion mark, 70percent of it will be in support of IMS-based services. That is important because the complexity of transaction event volume in an IMS architecture will increase by seven to 10 times over the volumes needed to support voice traffic today.

In addition to the increased volume of transactions and messaging, more complexity will be introduced by the need to support the transactions across third-party providers and multiple network types.

Testing this functionality cannot wait until the hardware community gets its entire house in order.

“It was bold to implement billing and OSS this early in the process,” said Thomas Maufer, director of technical marketing at MU Security. “Without billing, we can’t have a service.”

He said that he and other vendors come to the plugfest with the intention of breaking things. After Plugfest IV, he said, the industry is a lot more production ready.