Chapter 2
VoLTE Deployment Strategies
Global mobile networks have been driven by voice service since the beginning and voice has been the ‘killer’ application for many years. It can be said that there would be no mobile networks without voice services. Today, we have a new situation where data traffic is heavily growing in mobile networks and all deployments are going to be driven by data increase. Also from a standards point of view a data-driven approach has been selected where future mobile networks are based on the internet protocol (IP) technology and mobile services are built on top of the ‘data layer’.
The third generation partnership project (3GPP) long term evolution (LTE) is the main technology for further mobile networks and it can be said already now that it is the fastest developing mobile system technology ever. One reason is that LTE first deployments are for data with dongles and data cards including short message service (SMS) support, but services like voice will follow later. From a LTE deployment perspective the LTE voice service can be regarded as just one data application, but with specific requirements for real-time traffic, quality of service and interoperation with existing voice infrastructure [circuit switched (CS) core networks]. It is also self-evident that voice remains as a mandatory service in LTE.
The LTE/evolved packet core (EPC) standards have been designed as mobile technology based purely on the IP. The LTE/EPC networks will be driven by mobile ...
