Presence in the IP multimedia subsystem

With an ever increasing penetration of Internet Protocol (IP) technologies, the wireless industry is evolving the mobile core network towards all-IP network. The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a standardised Next Generation Network (NGN) architectural framework defined by the 3 Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to bridge the gap between circuit-switched and packet-switched networks and consolidate both sides into on single all-IP network for all services. In this paper, we provide an insight into the limitation of the presence service, one of the fundamental building blocks of the IMS. Our prototype-based study is unique of its kind and helps identifying the factors which limit the scalability of the current version of the presence service (3GPP TS 23.141 version 7.2.0 Release 7 [1]), which will in turn dramatically limit the performance of advanced IMS services. We argue that the client-server paradigm behind the current IMS architecture does not suite the requirements of the IMS system, which defies the very purpose of its introduction. We finally elaborate on possible avenues for addressing this problem.