Service continuity support in self-organizing IMS networks

The Next-Generation Networks (NGN), which can provide advanced multimedia services over all-IP based networks, was the subject of a lot of attention many years ago. While there have been tremendous efforts to develop its architecture and protocols, especially for IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), which is a key technology of the NGN, it is far from being widely deployed. However, efforts to create an advanced signaling infrastructure realizing many requirements have resulted in a large number of functional components and interactions between those components. Thus, carriers are trying to explore effective ways to deploy IMS while offering the value-added and rich communication services. As one of such approaches, we have proposed self-organizing IMS (SOIMS). The self-organizing IMS enables IMS functional components and corresponding physical nodes to adapt dynamically and automatically, based on situations like network load and available system resources while continuing the IMS operation. To realize this, service continuity provisioning to end-users is an important requirement when a reconfiguration occurs during the operation. This chapter proposes a novel mechanism that provides service continuity to end-users. The proposed mechanism has been implemented in a real system (prototype), and its performance evaluation analyzed in terms of number of control signaling and processing time during reconfiguration.