Naked Cats and IMS Conundrums

Joe McGarvey is a principal analyst with Current Analysis and a regular columnist for xchange. He can be reached at his email.

Outside of the political realm, polarization is actually a pretty healthy thing. For example, the whole world is roughly — and happily — divided over the solution to a handful of age-old conundrums. I know of no one, for example, who has been called an idiot or a terrorist depending on his or her response to the “If a tree falls in an uninhabited forest does it make a sound?” question.

In fact, philosophical divides can be a major contributor to diversity and renewal. Imagine the shape of the world if it were run exclusively by glass-half-full optimists or glass-half-empty pessimists. A healthy mix of proponents and critics of positions that have no definitive answer is exactly what is needed to keep the universe in balance. So, in the name of global peace and world harmony, I’ve chosen this space to introduce the next great philosophical riddle: Are house pets clothed or in a perpetual state of nakedness?

I’ve done the field work on this one, I’m sad to say, and roughly every other person I confront with this riddle, after rolling his or her eyes dismissively, unwaveringly recognizes fur or feathers as proper forms of clothing. The other, of course, is just as convinced that the domesticated cat, dog, hamster, parrot, etc., are unabashed exhibitionists.

The truth is that the Naked Cat Conundrum, or NCC, as I like to call it, is just one of many irresolvable questions floating around out there. On a more esoteric plane, telecommunications operators are discovering a handful of conundrums of their own as they make preparations to implement an IMS architecture. Like all conundrums, these IMS implementation issues have strong supporters on both sides and, when it comes down to it, no categorically correct solution.

Simplicity or Flexibility
The IMS specification, whether talking about the 3GPP, TISPAN or another flavor, is complex and dense. There is a movement of sorts under way to simplify the specification, largely by combining some of the discrete functionality to form fewer components and, as an added bonus, reduce the amount of external interfaces needed to string these components together. While this is an agreeable option for some carriers, others insist that this sort of simplification is weakening the framework in important areas, such as deployment flexibility, scalability and multivendor interoperability. The bottom line for some of these carriers is that the more you simplify the specification and dictate the grouping of functionality, the more you limit the opportunity for service providers to differentiate their IMS implementations.

Single Vendor or Third Party
There are arguably four core elements to an IMS solution: application creation, subscriber management, mobility management and session control. While every Tier 1 equipment maker is providing its own session control technology, some are relying on third parties to provide one or more of these other essential ingredients to an IMS solution. The conundrum confronting carriers in this case is whether or not the core of an IMS solution can be a multivendor amalgamation or if such a crucial set of functions needs to be sowed from the same research and development lab. Equipment vendors that offer their own generic application server and service creation environment, for example, argue that service providers cannot enjoy the same level of control and intimacy that is essential for the application-creation process if they are using a platform available to all competitors. Those on the other side argue the opposite — that support for third-party components provides customers with a choice and evidence of the openness of their overall IMS solution.

Centralized or Distributed
The service broker, also known as a Services Capability Interaction Manager (SCIM), and security are two of the most poorly defined portions of the 3GPP specification. As a result, multiple suggestions of how service convergence and security should be administered in an IMS deployment have been proposed. Those suggestions fall roughly into two camps: those that see the functionalities as being distributed throughout multiple IMS components, and those that believe security and service brokering should be centralized in a single entity. In the case of the SCIM, anyway, service providers are likely to circumvent the conundrum by adopting a combination of a centralized and distributed strategy to oversee multiple layers of service convergence.

As is the case of classic conundrums, the side that service providers fall on in solving their own implementation riddles will depend a great deal on the practical and philosophical leanings of the service provider. Those that are cautious and deliberate are likely to play it safe by not venturing far from the letter of the specifications and sticking with a single vendor for at least the foundation of their IMS-based architectures. Carriers more prone to risks, if there are such beasts in these Post-Bubble days, likely will apply as much art as science to their IMS construction project.

As for my leanings in regards to the Naked Cat Conundrum? Naked ... as a jaybird.

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