Design and Analysis for the 3G IP Multimedia Subsystem

  • Muhammad Alam

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

Abstract

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is the technology that will merge the Internet (packet switching) with the cellular world (circuit switching). It will make Internet technologies, such as the web, email, instant messaging, presence, and videoconferencing available nearly everywhere. Presence is one of the basic services that is likely to become omnipresent in IMS. It is the service that allows a user to be informed about the reachability, availability, and willingness of communication of another user. Push to talk over Cellular (PoC) is another service in IMS that is intended to provide rapid communications for business and consumer customers of mobile networks. In order to become a truly successful mass-market service for the consumer segment, the only realistic alternative is a standardized Push-to-talk solution providing full interoperability between terminals and operators. Instant Messaging (IM) is the service that allows an IMS user to send some content to another user in near real-time. This service works under IETF’s Message Session Relay protocol (MSRP) to overcome the congestion control problem. We believe the efficiency of these services along with the mobility management in IMS session establishment has not been sufficiently investigated. In this research work, we identify the key issues to improve the existing protocols in IMS for better system behaviour. The work is centred on the three services of IMS: (1) Presence Service, (2) Push-to-Talk over cellular and, (3) Instant Messaging and over the issue of (4) IMS session set up. The existing session establishment scenario of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) suffers from triangular routing for a certain period of time when an end IMS user or terminal is mobile. In this thesis, the performance of three possible session establishment scenarios in a mobile environment is compared by using an analytical model. The model is developed based on the expressions of cost functions, which represents system delay and overhead involved in sessions’ establishment. The other problem areas in optimizing presence service, dimensioning a PoC service and analysing service rates of IM relay extensions in IMS are identified. A presence server becomes overloaded when massive number of IMS terminals joins a network to request presence facility. Performance models are developed in this research to mitigate such load during heavy traffic for the presence service. Queuing analyses for different cases are provided while instant messaging chunks go through two consecutive relay nodes. The specific factors such as blocking probability, stability conditions, optimized subscription lifetime etc. in IMS environment parameters have been investigated. We have also elaborated models to dimension a PoC service for service providers with regards to controlling PoC session access, optimal PoC session timer, path optimization and number of allowable simultaneous PoC sessions for given network grade of service. In a nutshell, the contribution of this dissertation are: (a) a proposed robust scheduler to improve performance of the IMS presence service, (b) several derived models to dimension IMS Push-to-talk over cellular service, (c) a new mechanism to reduce cost for the IMS session set ups in mobile environment and (d) evaluation of message blocking and stability in IMS Instant Messaging (IM) service by applying queuing theories. All of these analyses have resulted in recommendations for the performance enhancements with optimal resource utilization in IMS framework
Date of Award29 Sept 2007
Original languageEnglish
SupervisorZheng Da Wu (Supervisor)

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