IMS perspective
IMS opens up new perspectives for network operators. Nevertheless, some challenges need to be faced to make it a widely adopted technology.
IMS opens up new perspectives for network operators. Nevertheless, some challenges need to be faced to make it a widely adopted technology.
From a business point of view, If IMS gives the network operators a more central role to play in the business chain of value, they need to make or obtain content for their services (M. Tadault, 2004). And they need to fix new business models to base their role of in the billing of services on. New actors came to the scene with IMS like content providers and content aggregators, which means for the operators: new competitors from the internet world. The decision to deploy IMS is more a strategic decision than a technological decision.
On the technical side of the issue, IMS introduces new networking paradigms, provides only specifications, not implementation-ready solutions, and uses some recent protocols like Diameter that have not been widely deployed. Moreover, the interoperability problems aren’t fully solved.
The TISPAN IMS aim to be access agnostic. Consequently, IMS has to manage the different access related constraints imposed by different access technologies, and this makes the establishment of end-to-end QoS guarantees difficult.
Several promising technologies (e.g. P2P, VPNs, SMS and IPTV) will join IMS architecture to provide more complete multimedia services with unified network architecture.