A case for IMS

In this article, we will highlight how IMS can provide an excellent technological platform to overcome these limitations. We demonstrate that IMS is a suitable platform for developing a highly scalable framework for unified access of information stemming from globally distributed and heterogeneous sensor networks. Overall, such a framework will facilitate more intelligent, invisible, and autonomous applications that depend or exploit knowledge about the people, places, and things in the physical world. We first elaborate on concrete challenges that need to be addressed when building such a framework and show concrete benefits of the IMS platform that facilitate its development. The remainder of this article is dedicated to two enabling services that illustrate the benefits of IMS in their respective way. The first approach describes Telefonica´s USN-Enabler that focuses on providing unified access to heterogeneous sensor networks by using standardized sensor descriptions and low-level interfaces. The second approach presents NEC´s intelligent context enabler (ICE) focusing on high level and declarative access to contextualized sensor data with the goal to facilitate application development by putting core management functionalities into the system and allow system-internal adaptation.