Enabling triple play services over NGN

Triple play is the term used in the telecommunications market for describing the unified offering of three services: Television, Telephony (IP-based) and Internet. Enabling triple play services within the concept of Next Generation Networks (NGN) over fixed and mobile access networks brings many research issues. This demands design and development of new frameworks and testbeds for trialing these services. The attention to triple play services has increased recently, and also enabling architectures like the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) offer today possibilities to deliver triple play services with quality of service and mobility support. However, IMS alone is not suited for offering these services, since it does not support multicast and broadcast transmission modes. This paper presents the design of a framework that addresses these issues by integrating and testing the IMS with multicast and broadcast capabilities. These efforts resulted in the creation of the Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS Media Interoperability Lab (MIL), which is as an open environment gathering all major IMS core components, and triple play toolkit originating from own developments as well as major industry players, which can be used by academic and industrial partners for early prototyping of new triple play services, related components, protocols, and applications. An overview of the relevant technologies of the laboratory is presented and an implementation with measurement results is carried.