IMS Service Broker Feasibility Study in 3GPP Release 8 (Industrial Report)

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is the wireless standards development organization setting the standards for evolving mobile broadband beyond the Global System for Mobile communication (GSM). The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is an architectural framework standardized by the 3GPP for delivering IP multimedia services based on the IETF Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). As the integration of multiple IP multimedia applications via resolving their interactions is an important requirement for the IMS, the 3GPP Services and System Aspects Working Group 2 (SA2) launched a feasibility study on enhancing IMS for better service interaction management in Release 8. This paper reports some important results of this feasibility study from 2006 to 2008 under 3GPP TR 23.810. It describes an incremental enhancement to IMS service control to enable dynamic service interaction management. Several examples we contributed to TR 23.810 are presented in this report to illustrate the ideas. Finally, the report points out open issues for further research in this area.