Based on the progress in global Long-term Evolution (LTE) role out and coincident deployment of Evolved Packet Core (EPC) platforms, network operators are confronted with the question of what mobile services they will have to provide in the future in order to compete with the growing number of successful over the top (OTT) multimedia services. Voice is still the key revenue generating service and thus will also have to be provided above the packet switched only LTE/EPC networks. Here IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) is considered as the solution for the provision of Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and emerging Rich Communications Services (RCS), although in the short term Circuit Switched Fallback (CSFB) solutions are considered key for providing mobile voice services.
In addition, it is becoming obvious, that machine to machine (M2M) / machine type communication (MTC) services will lead soon to a huge increase in bandwidth with a big potential for future revenue generation. Therefore both industry and standardization bodies have started to develop corresponding solutions and standards. Similar to the convergence in fixed and mobile telecommunication (FMC) and the convergence of telecommunication and Internet in the last decade, also existing proprietary M2M platforms will now start to converge towards a common Internet Protocol (IP) based service and communication infrastructure, which will be provided to application developers via appropriate standardized application programming interfaces (APIs). In particular, emerging smart city information and communication technology platforms will have to cope with the efficient support and a potential integration of still distinct human to human and machine to machine communication platforms.
Cloud technology and its adoption for access network, core network, and service platform virtualization will play a key role for the urgently needed energy and thus cost savings and is currently a hot topic in Future Internet research as it represents a key paradigm shift for business models and architectural frameworks for converged networks.
All these above topics are closely related and have been addressed in detail at the FUSECO Forum 2011, which has brought these current industry and research buzzwords into a common context.
The first day started with three technical half day tutorials. More than 100 experts attended the first half day tutorial “Control Platforms and Applications for Next Generation Networks and the Future Internet – Understanding NGN, IMS, EPC, and MTC Standards and their Relationships in regard to the Future Internet” given by Prof. Dr. Thomas Magedanz. The tutorial introduced the key control platform technologies to newcomers and put those into a common context by addressing the evolution of NGNs toward the Future Internet and outlining the vision of total convergence of different devices, networks, and service platforms in the context of Smart Cities.