Words from the Chair

The famous IMS workshop series is history. Looking back at five very successful editions of this workshop we carefully reviewed the growth of the content areas and the status quo of IMS technology and services. How do we say in Germany, you have to “leave a party at the zenith”. Indeed we could have easily continued this workshop series as IMS technology is going to be deployed globally these days. However, we have a mission at FOKUS considering us as pioneers and missioners for emerging technologies. In this regard, and from an R&D perspective, IMS is not a hot topic anymore. IMS has done a great job in being a reference architecture for SIP-based control platforms and services and it is going to be deployed for PSTN-like VoIP in fixed and mobile broadband networks. But IMS has failed to become the general control platform for IP services, as SIP signaling represents just a very small percentage of the overall “Internet signaling”, which is dominated by HTTP. Hence a new control platform is needed, particularly when considering also the global hype around the Future Internet, which includes the Internet of things, the Internet of services and the network of the future. Here we see a lot of open R&D topics.

Exactly in between the NGN/IMS and the Future Internet we consider the 3GPP Evolved Packet Core (EPC) as the potential common control platform for IP-based services as it allows the seamless provision of multimedia communication and information services on top of different IP-based wireless and wired broadband networks. The EPC is inheriting a lot from IMS concepts in terms of providing common user authentication, policy charging and control, and mobility services on top of different IP networks. But EPC stands today where IMS has stood five years ago; it is a very promising technology, complex, but still in “infancy” and not very well understood by the industry and academia.

We at FOKUS have started to work on EPC two years ago and we are proud to provide today the OpenEPC (www.openepc.net) toolkit to implement EPC-based testbeds, such as the Future Seamless Communication FUSECO Playground (www.fuseco-playground.org). So we feel it is time to start again a corresponding workshop series to spread the knowhow about this promising technology, its potentialities and open issues. In this regard, we are going back to the roots of the IMS workshop series, by setting a clear technical workshop focus on an emerging key technology and enable a technical discussion among operators, vendors, integrators and researchers. We believe strongly, that many IMS researchers and developers will soon work on EPC and EPC-based applications, thus attendees of previous IMS workshops may also consider this event as the sixth edition. However, as we start something new, we call this new event series the FOKUS Future Seamless Communication (FUSECO) Forum.

To make a long story short, I cordially invite you to the new International FOKUS FUSECO Forum in Berlin, Germany, on October 14 and 15, 2010, right after ICIN 2010.

Whether you are already part of the FOKUS family (this is how we call the attendees of previous events staying typically in close contact with us), or whether you may plan to visit us for the first time, I am convinced, that you will enjoy two interesting days, where you will gain new insights, have interesting expert talks and make new friends from all over the world.

I hope to welcome you in October in Berlin.

Yours sincerely,
Prof. Dr. Thomas Magedanz and the TU Berlin/FOKUS team

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