GMI 2008 — the MultiService Forum’s (MSF) massive biennial interoperability event spanning three continents — is currently underway with twenty-two vendor participants and some 225 devices under test. This year’s event reflects the growing role of IMS in enabling network service integration. A particular emphasis on emerging IPTV applications has been underlined by the co-operation between the MSF and the Alliance for Telecommunications Solutions (ATIS). This is the first time the MSF has formally partnered with a standards organization.
GMI 2008 involves the testing of six physical scenarios, including 82 basic test cases with nearly 500 test permutations. The test plans extend over 600 pages.
The first two physical scenarios test End-to-End Session Control, with QoS, for a range of access technologies — baseband, broadband, 3GPP, WIMAX, 3GPP2 & TD-SCDMA — over a converged core network. The third scenario addresses IPTV, with an emphasis on specifications developed by the ATIS IIF. This is the first time standardized IPTV is being put to the test in a network context to validate automatic configuration of set top boxes, and to deliver true quality of experience.
The continuing growth in feature-rich mobile telephony underlines the significance of the fourth scenario: location based services, including routing and privacy issues. The solution under test is designed to work synergistically with that of other organizations such as NENA, and will make use of standards already in place.
Scenario five, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), integrates IMS with web-based services. This scenario is designed to test the capability for carriers to access a virtually unlimited range of services for a public that is increasingly demanding the full richness of web services both at home and on the move. The final scenario addresses management issues, in particular the on-line management of IPTV set top boxes and collection of IPTV related statistics without the cost and delay that results from the servicing truck-rolls of today’s TV systems.
“What’s unique about our work” commented Roger Ward, President of the MSF, “is the way our members have collaborated to define six networked test scenarios of practical interest to major carriers as a focus for validating the MSF Release 4 architectural framework and supporting Implementation Agreements (IAs). With five major carriers and test labs hosting GMI 2008, we have had no trouble in attracting leading vendors from three continents to participate and are sure that we will achieve results that will be of great value both to MSF members and to the industry as a whole.
“In GMI 2008, interoperability testing is conducted first within each lab, and then between labs, for each of the six test scenarios. With so many results to collate, a customized test capture tool had to be developed specifically for this event, giving the MSF a unique capability to capture, automatically aggregate, and analyze globally distributed test results” Ward noted.http://www.msforum.org/http://www.atis.org/
