Self organizing IP multimedia subsystem

While there have been tremendous efforts to develop the architecture and protocols to support advanced Internet-based services over 3G and 4G networks, IMS is far from being deployed in a wide scale manner. Effort to create an operator controlled signaling infrastructure using IP-based protocols has resulted in a large number of functional components and interactions between those components. Thus, the carriers are trying to explore alternative ways to deploy IMS that will allow them to manage their network in a cost effective manner while offering the value-added services. One of such approaches is self organization of IMS. The self organizing IMS can enable the IMS functional components and corresponding nodes to adapt them dynamically based on the features like network load, number of users and available system resources. This paper introduces such a self organizing and adaptive IMS architecture, describes the advanced functions and demonstrates the initial results from the prototype test-bed. In particular, we show how all IMS functional components can be merged and split among different nodes as the network demand and environment change without disrupting the ongoing sessions or calls. Although it is too early to conclude the effectiveness of self organizing IMS, initial results are encouraging and it may provide additional incentives to the operators for network evolution.