An IMS-Based Testbed for Fleet Management Services

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is considered the current Service Delivery Platform standard for providing multimedia services in Next Generation Networks (NGN). Although fleet management services are traditionally focused on voice communications, they are evolving towards broadband multimedia ones. For this reason, this paper presents an open IMS-based platform that provides advanced multimedia professional services in the aforementioned scenario. After a detailed analysis of the fleet communication requirements, the IMS-based architecture of the platform is presented. Then, the deployed services are described, from the basic ones to those more advanced, e.g. Push-To-Talk (PTT) and videoconferencing. It stands out the feature of the platform, which provides an environment that facilitates the development, deployment and integration of new services. We finally discuss the importance of the contributions made by the platform for the fleet management scenarios.