MSF Certification Effort to Focus Initially on RTCP

In the ongoing quest by service providers to not get locked into single-vendor solutions as they move to next-generation networks, the MultiService Forum (MSF) continues to expand its horizons. Its latest effort on this front is to offer certification testing, in partnership with testing lab Iometrix, initially related to real-time control protocol.

RTCP is used to allow end-to-end measurement of the delay, jitter and packet loss experienced by a given media stream. In next-generation networks, RTCP is used by gateways and end systems to record call statistics, passing them up to a call agent or other control plane entity. Placement of raw statistics into call billing records can aid in dealing with customer complaints or an inter-operator disputes. They can also help with real-time analysis to identify faults in the network that are otherwise masked.

Although the RTCP and related standards already exist, MSF President Roger Ward says there is a great deal of variety in actual implementations of them. So, through its new initiative, the MSF is certifying the operation of the protocol and the accuracy of the results reported by the systems using the protocol. For example, if a network has a known 5 percent packet loss, the system must report 5 percent packet loss to pass. Ward says the MSF expects to release early results toward the end of this year.

At the same time it is working on the launch of its certification program, the MSF is readying to announce a permanent test bed, which it expects to reveal more details about in the next four to six weeks, says Ward. That permanent test bed will help “harden” MSF implementation agreements (IAs) and aid in the preparation for the group’s 2008 Global MSF Interoperability (GMI) event.

In 2002, GMI focused on gateways between different networks; in 2004 GMI addressed the softswitch; in 2006 it was about IMS and QoS. The focus for GMI next year will be on applications, IPTV, QoS and location management, which are the four key areas MSF has been focused on this year.

MSF meets face to face four times a year, and works in 18-month cycles, Ward explains. At the end of each cycle, the group has the large, global interop event known as GMI, which has large service providers at multiple sites around the globe connecting their networks to test various MSF IAs. GMI 2008 will take place at in the October to November 2008 time frame; the service providers to host the event have yet to be publicly identified.

In terms of applications, one of the four areas on which MSF is now working, the group is aiming to extend the MSF architecture to include integration of Web services and validation with increasingly complex services. In terms of IPTV, MSF aims to create IAs relating to delivery mechanisms, content from third-party domain, session mobility and content-related interactivity. And the group’s location management efforts are focused on addressing how to register endpoints on the network in light of the loss of geographical relevance of calling information due to the nomadic nature of said endpoints.

MultiService Forum www.msforum.org

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