A survey of IMS clients for NGN service delivery

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is becoming the de facto overlay architecture for enabling service delivery in converged environments. In order to take full advantage of the main features offered by the IMS, there is the need to enable a reliable environment that allows testing the delivery of IMS services to end users. As in any other overlay network, the terminals play a key role in any deployment, and allow verifying if the newly created services are correctly configured and provisioned. Acknowledging the importance of reliable endpoints, this paper introduces four free IMS clients and compares them in terms of their performance, consumed hardware resources, standards alignment, and usability, with the goal of both, giving an overview of the environments currently available for their development, and testing their behavior in a real IMS deployment.