Architecture and Key Issues of IMS-Based Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is changing the way of developing, deploying and managing applications. However, as typical Internet-based applications, cloud computing services lack carrier-grade signaling control mechanism and cannot guaranty Quality of Service (QoS), which have actually become technical barriers for telecom operator to provide commercial public cloud services. On the other hand, as the core signaling architecture of Next Generation Networking (NGN), IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is facing the problem of the lack of innovative value-added services. This paper presents an architecture to support cloud computing services over IMS. In the proposed architecture, cloud services are regarded as the general IMS applications and then cloud clients are allowed to access cloud services under the control of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) signaling and QoS mechanism of IMS. This paper introduces architecture overview and cloud service relevant functional components, and mainly discusses several key issues including cloud notification mechanism, QoS and charging control of IMS-based cloud computing services.