Plugfest 8

Oct. 5-9, 2009 at UNH IOL

The IMS/NGN Forum Plugfest™ is the most frequent interoperability event in the industry. Our methodology was developed and perfected as a joint effort of our members and partners. With Plugfest 8 scheduled for October 5-9 at the IMS/NGN Interoperability Lab at the University of New Hampshire at Durham, the forum will mark another important milestone - setting the testing for interoperability for roaming and visiting subscribers. The list of IMS/NGN services to be tested include VoIP (RCS, MMTel and Centrex), IPTv (ATIS and ETSI), presence services, security, billing and OSS/BSS support. Test plans for Diameter and control plane are also offered.

Participation is open to service providers, cable companies, and vendors delivering IMS products and solutions.

Plugfest 8 will cover IMS/NGN Interoperability in the following areas: IMS/NGN end-to-end testing on meshed IMS networks

Interoperability for roaming and visiting subscribers
Inclusion of topology hiding, border controllers, legacy networks gateways, service location function, and policy control.
Expand the usage of fully qualifies domain names within both the SIP and DIAMETER interfaces. Use DNS to provide round-robin load balancing to multiple I-CSCF systems.
Extend the use of NAPTR and SRV records by limiting the number of A records.
On-line charging
Further study of IPsec on the Gm interface
Inclusion of IPv6 within the core network.
IMS/NGN Control Plane interoperability:
- Basic Protocol Conformance: Connectivity and Peering, Routing and Relaying of messages and Redirect Agent providing routing instructions to peer nodes
- Application and Feature Testing: This level tests that application are able to interoperate across the interface. This level of testing is necessary since different implementations may use different methods to meet the Diameter requirements. These different methods may give rise to unexpected behaviors causing two compliant implementations to fail to interoperate.