Thomas Trayer Towle

IMS service-based bearer control

With the blurring of the lines between traditional telephony services and the growing number of Internet Protocol (IP)-based services available to customers of voice- and data-service providers, there is a growing need to provide a vertical interface between the service/session layer (where the service intelligence exists) and the transport layer (which provides the bearer path for service data traffic). The communication between the service/session layer and the bearer plane is referred to in standards organizations and in this paper as service-based bearer control (SBBC). The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2), the International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Focus Group on Next Generation Networks, and other standards organizations are discussing interfaces to provide SBBC functionality. This paper addresses the requirements of the SBBC interfaces and provides information about the capabilities they provide, but it does not reflect any particular set of standards, because the standards in this area are still very much under development. Rather, it presents various issues that are being discussed and that will influence the standards that are ultimately agreed upon.