A testbed for experimentation of innovative services in the B3G framework

UMTS 3G networks are going to be widely deployed commercially, even if in their first releases they will be mainly focused on telephony and multimedia services based on circuit switched technologies. The roll out of the 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), that can be forecast to happen in the next few years, will introduce mobile users to a new class of multimedia services based on the Internet protocol. The research community is already investigating a possible evolution for the 3G networks based on heterogeneous high-speed access networks allowing new multimedia services and a global coverage (Beyond 3G - B3G). In the present paper we describe a testbed developed by the Co.Ri.TeL. Consortium in the framework of the Presto Project, whose objective is to provide a suitable and common platform, inspired to the IMS ideas, for experimenting a wide variety of B3G SIP-based mobile services. The services experimented on top of the testbed include a multiuser video conferencing architecture, added-value user-defined multimedia services, an audio-video message box and a video-on-demand provisioning infrastructure. The service provisioning mechanisms are all built within a common mobility-management and security framework, providing an approach which is independent from the various possible underlying radio access technologies. In particular, the security capabilities of the developed architecture comprise user and network authentication, authorization to service access and IP-layer signalling cryptography integrated with application-layer mobility.

Introduction

The delay in the roll out of 3G WCDMA based networks and the contemporaneous increasing penetration of new radio access technologies for local and personal area coverage (e.g. WiFi 802.11a to g, Bluetooth) are pushing the technical and scientific community to start a deep investigation on architectures and concepts that can integrate different radio coverage technologies in one network supporting, with these technologies, the various user needs.