CoSIMS

CoSIMS – (Community-enabling Services on IMS) is an R&D project, financed and conducted by Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in cooperation with Hewlett Packard Corp., T-Systems, trommsdorff + drüner GmbH and the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS, investigating the provision of community based services by emerging 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) / ETSI TISPAN NGN Release 2 based service platforms. The project started in November 2005 as one of the biggest R&D projects of the T-Laboratories and is still ongoing.

First phase:

The target of the first phase of this project is based on an analysis of existing real and virtual communities and the identification of required information and communication enablers which could be provided by the network and service infrastructure. Assuming that IMS will play a major platform role in face of emerging NGNs, the validation of IMS core capabilities and related Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) service enablers as well as the identification of additional capabilities for providing a powerful eCommunity service framework stands in the center of this phase. A field trial was scheduled by end of 2006 to provide a proof of concept. FOKUS provided the key IMS platform and OMA service enabler knowhow and an Open IMS testbed to enable the early prototyping of CoSIMS applications. Additionally, FOKUS developed a CoSIMS related IMS mobile client that contains, beside all group communication functions, enhanced ad-hoc group management and monitoring capabilities.

Second phase:

In the beginning of 2007 CoSIMS enters phase 2, which concentrates more on the integration of the Internet community world by defining a CoSIMS Web 2.0 Toolkit. Together with a revised group and community model, this Toolkit allows internet communities to extend their portals with group communication features for their members. Because the first prototype for the mobile client was based on the Java CDC profile, possible devices were very limited. Therefore, a new partner was found for implementing a client that runs on a broader range of end devices, especially for devices based on Symbian 60.

Current phase:

Now it’s time to bring CoSIMS to real life and do the step beyond a prototype implementation towards a system that serves for real communities. The third phase, which is still ongoing, will try to integrate the platform into the gamesclub community which is part of the gamesload (http://www.gamesload.de) portal of the Deutsche Telekom. FOKUS will extend the IMS based infrastructure with management functionality, allowing a much more reliable operation of the platform. Fault management, alarm escalation chains, centralized configuration capabilities and more makes the used IMS infrastructure ready for real life deployments.