Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

In their drive to increase revenues, more service providers are embracing the IMS (IP Multimedia subsystem) service architecture to offer new feature-rich multimedia services. A key component of IMS is the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for managing multimedia sessions. As the platform for session control, the SIP servers have to respond to user requests quickly enough, especially for real-time type sessions. The proposed solution is to adopt an autonomic approach to engineering SIP servers. To achieve the properties of an autonomic system, the proposed solution will include a self-monitoring component that will feed into an embedded performance analysis capability. This combination of self-awareness and analysis will enable near real-time allocations of resources in SIP servers, and in the improvement of the transmission and handling of SIP messages over wireless access networks such as the combination of wireless mesh networks backed by a WiMax network. Major Canadian telecom firms (Nortel, Alcatel) adopt the IMS architecture and use SIP to deliver multimedia services. New small firms, such as NewStep and SIPquest, have products based on SIP. This research will aim to develop an advanced management solution that, when incorporated into SIP servers, will cut operation costs and make more efficient use of network resources. Currently Nortel has agreed to serve as the industrial partner and provide both cash and in-kind contrbutions for this proposed project. We plan to have two Ph.D. students and two Master students working on this project. This will be an excellent opportunity for those students to learn the latest technology in a hot research area and also accumulate experience in dealing with an industrial company. We believe that the project bennefit Canada in general by helping Canadian companies maintain leadership in next-generation communications technology.