Design and Implementation Aspects of Open Source NGN Test-bed Software Toolkits

Information and Communication Technologies provide for a long time already the backbone of telecommunication networks, such that communication services represent an elementary foundation of today's globally connected economy. The telecommunication landscape has experienced dramatic transformations through the convergence of the Telecom and the Internet worlds. The previously closed telecommunication domain is currently transforming itself through the so-called NGN evolution into a highly dynamic multiservice infrastructure, supporting rich multimedia applications, as well as providing comprehensive support for various access technologies. The control layer of such NGNs is then of paramount importance, as representing the convergent mediator between access and services. The use and the optimization of the IP-Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) was researched and considered in this domain for many years now, such that today it represents the world-wide recognized control platform for fixed and mobile NGNs. Research on protocols and services for such NGN architectures, due to the convergence of technologies, applications and business models, as well as for enabling highly dynamic and short innovation cycles, is highly complex and requires early access to vendor independent - yet close to real life systems - validation environments, the so-called open technology test-beds. The present thesis describes the extensive research of the author over the last nine years in the field of open NGN test-beds. It focuses on the design, development and deployment of the Open Source IMS Core project, which represents since years the foundation of numerous NGN test-beds and countless NGN Research & Development projects in the academia as well as the industry domain around the globe. A major emphasis is given for ensuring flexibility, performance, reference functionality and inter-operability, as well as satisfying elementary design principles of such test-bed toolkits. The study also describes and evaluates the use of Open Source principles, highlighting the advantages of using it in regard to the creation, impact and sustainability of a global OpenIMSCore research community. Moreover, the work documents that the essential design principles and methodology employed can be reused in a generic way to create test-bed toolkits in other technology domains. This is shown by introducing the OpenEPC project, which provides for seamless integration of different mobile broadband technologies.