The date has been set for the IMS/NGN Forum’s annual interoperability event known as Plugfest. Comverse and Mu Dynamics, the chairs of the forum’s two newest working groups, will drive the effort for billing and security for the October event.
Plugfest 8 will take place Oct. 5-9, at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH IOL) in Durham, NH. It also will leverage the work of the Diameter and Control Plane Working Groups.
The interoperability event will focus on the following three goals: end-to-end interoperability testing for IMS and NGN applications and services, interoperability of the Control Plane and the Diameter Protocol, and the charging functions impacts on BSS. As the event gets closer, these goals will be refined and expanded.
The working groups are working on guideline documents that will be released in the coming weeks and incorporated into the testing. Michael Khalilian, chairman and president of the NGN IMS Forum, said Plugfest 8 will showcase the great progress that these groups have made in advancing NGN and IMS architectures.
Khalilian also emphasized the importance of the non-architecture contribution from BSS/OSS and security participants. “Almost every Tier 1 and Tier 2 service provider globally has transitioned to some level of NGN. The next step is how to offer more services through that platform and get access to the consumer. That’s where the IMS architecture comes in, but if you can’t manage those services, or secure them or bill for them, it doesn’t matter how good your architecture technology is,” he said.
With that in mind, the forum created the Security and BSS/OSS working group lead by Comverse and Mu Dynamics.
Alice Bartram, AVP of billing and active customer management marketing at Comverse, said her working group’s goal is to make sure BSS and OSS are consider up front as people plan their next generation networks, particularly in the areas of smart charging and monetization. “Those are the concepts we are working on putting into the guidelines and hope to incorporate into Plugfest 8,” Bartram said. “We hope to set up scenarios that will look at things like value-based charging on QoS, for example, or for multiple services within the same session where each service would be charged differently and separately and, obviously, accurately.”
While Comverse is new to the forum, Mu Dynamics is not. The company has been providing testing solutions for the events for years. Thomas Maufer, director of technical marketing at Mu Dynamics, said he has seen a continuous upwards trajectory the last few years regarding success of the interoperability tests. “With every Plugfest it takes less time to get the network up and running, so there are definitely improvements in interoperability. And the scope of what we try to do each time gets bigger,” Maufer, said.
