Preface to the Second Edition
The pace at which new IMS-related technologies have been developed in the last year has been impressive. Based on the deployment experiences of their members and on feedback from several organizations, 3GPP and 3GPP2 have worked extensively to update the IMS architecture so that it supports a wide range of new services.
While many of these updates consist of extensions to provide more functionality, some of them consist of simplifications to the IMS architecture. These simplifications make the IMS architecture more robust and reliable, or increase the performance of services implemented on top of it.
Examples of organizations that provide feedback to 3GPP and 3GPP2 on how to evolve the IMS are the OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) and the standardization bodies involved in the developing of NGN (Next Generation Networks). These organizations use the IMS as a base to provide different types of services.
The second edition of this book, in addition to describing updates to the IMS architecture, includes extensive discussions on the NGN architecture and the services it provides, and on the OMA PoC (Push-to-talk over Cellular) service. We are confident that the reader will find the chapters on these IMS-based services useful.
From the feedback received on the first edition, it seems that many readers found the structure of the book novel and useful. Readers agreed that first describing how a technology works on the Internet before discussing how it applies to ...
