Next Generation Network Infrastructures

The main services offered by the FOKUS competence center NGNI comprise technology coaching, state of the art component and control platform toolkits and proof of concept implementations as well as conformance testing for fixed and wireless Next Generation Networks and Open Service Delivery Platforms for open converged telecommunication environments and emerging Smart Cities.

Technical foundation for these services provide the globally recognized NGNI software toolkits and the related NGNI technology testbeds – called “Playgrounds”, which integrate both FOKUS developments as well as partner products to reflect the state of the art. Based on our deep knowledge and practical expertise in traditional and NGN signaling protocols, we recognized the importance of the IP Multimedia System (IMS) and its role as a universal control platform in fixed, mobile, and cable networks. Thus in 2005 we developed the Open Source IMS Core (OSIMS) downloadable from www.openimscore.org, which formed the foundation for the famous Open IMS Playground.

Understanding the strong relationship between the IMS and Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs), in summer 2007 FOKUS NGNI has opened the Open SOA Telco Playground, an open testbed for experiencing and validating  the development, provisioning, execution, and management of converging fixed and mobile Next Generation Network applications based on SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) principles. The heart of the OSTP forms the FOKUS Broker and related service enablers, which are accessible via standardized Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), such as GSM ONE API.

Recognizing the growing demand for mobile broadband communications and emerging Long-term Evolution (LTE) networks, we identified the 3GPP Evolved Packet Core (EPC) as the next key control platform for providing multimedia services seamless across various wireless networks maintaining Quality of Service. Thus in November 2009, we showed a first demonstration of the FOKUS OpenEPC – a prototype implementation of the 3GPP Release 8 Evolved Packet Core (EPC) – at the 5th FOKUS IMS Workshop 2009. In April 2010, Release 1 of OpenEPC was launched with support for mobility management and roaming configuration support and support for subscription management and policy control, which was followed by Release 2 in 20011, and the newest Release 3 supporting all relevant access network types has been published in 2012.

In May 2010, we launched the FUSECO Playground – an open technology and applications testbed for investigating and experiencing Future Seamless Communications (FUSECO), integrating various state of the art wireless broadband network technologies into our OpenEPC platform, as well as an open set of higher layer control platforms. One of these platforms represents IMS in order to support Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and new Rich Communication Services (RCS). But in addition, and even more important, we recognized the importance of emerging Machine 2 Machine (M2M) control platforms, which has led to the development of the new Open Machine Type Communication (Open MTC) platform (link) in 2012. These developments and the international feedback by the industry can be witnessed by the success of the annual FOKUS FUSECO Forum (link), which has become the successor of the famous IMS Workshop series since 2010.

Today, the FUSECO playground is designed to support all kinds of communication patterns occuring in emerging smart city enviroments, including human 2 human and machine 2 machine communication, and particularly supports the seamless mobile access to emerging cloud-based service platforms. While the FUSECO playground is designed to optimize connectivity and the related communication entities and protocols, the higher layer Open SOA Telco Playground is addressing the programmability of the underlying infrastructure by corresponding service enablers and abstraction APIs and related policy based exposure capabilities. The NGNI toolkits and testbeds are used since many years by the R&D labs of well known operators and vendors around the globe. In addition, the NGNI team, which currently comprises more than 60 staff members, is active within key national and European R&D projects related to NGN evolution, Future Internet, and Smart Cities. See our reference customers list and R&D projects list for details. 

NGNI is strongly cooperating with the chair for Next Generation Networks (AV – Architektur der Vermittlungsknoten in German) within the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Faculty of the Technische Universität Berlin in the context of Master and PhD student education and research and development related to the above mentioned platforms. However, going one step beyond, the university chair is focussing it´s research on NGN 2 Future Internet evolution and thus has developed globally recognized tools for Future Internet testbed realization and federation. One of these tools is the Teagle platform for testbed federation (www.fire-teagle.org). The academic impact can be witnessed by the AV participation in key national and European FI R&D projects, as well as the success of the GI/ITG KUVS workshop series on Next Generation Service Delivery Platforms launched in 2010.

Read more about the NGN evolution towards the Future Internet (NGN2FI) here.