Toward A Full Implementation of the Operation and Support Subsystem (OSS) in IMS Networks

Abstract

Recently, mobile operators all over the world are facing big challenges on the decreasing of the revenues from its traditional killer-applications like SMS/MMS and even voice services. The challenges come from a new trend of services called OTT (Over The Top). These OTT services provide the mobile users with flexible, convenient and more importantly free means to do their daily multimedia communication needs and seamlessly without any border so that operators couldn’t be just simply block it, but in opposite, need to find solutions to compete against it. Because of that, nowadays, more and more operators choose to deploy the standard RCS (Rich Communication Suite). RCS is a set of rich features communication services developed on top of IMS framework. Although there have been tremendous efforts to develop the architecture and protocols for IMS, which is a key technology of the NGN, it is far from being widely deployed. There are many reasons for that unpopularity (of IMS commercial deployment), namely, the lacking of clear business model for IMS-based services, no big difference between IMS-based services and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) services, lack of the true demands for features that IMS based services have, etc... However, one of the most important reason that till now not many researchers have pointed out and addressed it, is about the OSS (Operation and Support Subsystem) functions. The lacking of OSS clearly defined functions and interfaces make the difficulties for operators and even equipment manufacturers to collect the pay back for any big scale IMS deployment for their networks. This paper presents our proven that IMS can provide the killer applications with blending features like mash-up and readily equipped with the intelligent charging and policy control functions. That may partly help to speed up the deployment process of IMS in real networking environment.