authenticate user’s identity again. The P-CSCF per-
forms also compression and decompression of SIP
messages, when the messages between the terminal
and the P-CSCF are sent over a narrowband channel.
In addition, the P-CSCF verifies the correctness of
SIP requests sent by the IMS terminal. The Policy De-
cision Function (PDF) may form part of the P-CSCF.
The PDF (not depicted) manages QoS over the media
plane and authorizes media plane resources as well.
I-CSCF: In order to find the next SIP hop for a cer-
tain message, the SIP server obtains the address of
an I-CSCF of the destination domain. Its address is
available in the DNS records of the domain. The I-
CSCF works as proxy server routing the SIP request
to the appropriate destination (normally an S-CSCF).
To find out the address of the next hop (e.g. the S-
CSCF allocated to the user) the I-CSCF retrieves user
location information from the HSS (and SLF if nec-
essary) using Diameter over the Cx interface.
The S-CSCF is the central element of the signal-
ing plane. The S-CSCF is a SIP server that acts
as registrar and performs session control as well. It
maintains a binding between the user location (e.g.,
the IP address of the terminal in use) and the user’s
SIP address of record (also known as a Public User
Identity). Therefore, all the SIP signalling, that the
IMS terminal sends or receives, traverses the allo-
cated S-CSCF. Because all the signalling traffic tra-
verses the allocated S-CSCF, it is capable of perform-
ing various control session tasks. It inspects every SIP
message and determines whether the SIP signalling
should visit one or more ASs, which might provide
a service to the user. It keeps users from perform-
ing unauthorized operations, enforcing the policy of
the network operator. It provides routing services,
e.g., the user dials a number instead of a SIP URI
and the number needs to be translated into a SIP URI.
The S-CSCF needs to obtain user-related information
from the HSS, consequently, it implements a Diame-
ter interface to it. If a user wants to access the IMS,
the S-CSCF downloads authentication vectors from
the HSS to authenticate this user. Moreover, the S-
CSCF also downloads the user profile from the HSS,
which includes the service profile. The service profile
lets the S-CSCF know when a SIP message should be
routed through one or more Application Servers. Fi-
nally, when a S-CSCF is allocated to a certain user
(for the duration of the registration) the HSS is in-
formed by that S-CSCF.
The Home Subscriber Server (HSS) is an evolu-
tion of the Home Location Register (HLR) present in
GSM networks. All the user-related subscription data
required to establish multimedia sessions is stored in
this central repository. The most significant items of
information include location information, security in-
formation (authentication and authorization informa-
tion), user profile information (e.g. the services the
user is subscribed to), and the S-CSCF allocated to
the user.
The Application Server (AS) hosts and executes ser-
vices interfacing the S-CSCF using SIP and option-
ally the HSS. The AS can operate in SIP proxy mode,
SIP User Agent (UA) mode, or SIP Back to Back UA
(B2BUA) mode. SIP AS (Application Server): this
is the native Application Server that hosts and exe-
cutes IP Multimedia Services based on IP. This type
of server will be used to develop the final application
as it is expected that new IMS services will be de-
veloped in this way. The OSA-SCS (Open Service
Access- Service Capability Server) provides an inter-
face to the OSA framework application server. On
one side the AS is interfacing the S-CSCF and on the
other there is an interface between the OSA AS and
the OSA Application Programming Interface. The IP
Multimedia Switching Function (IM-SSF) enables to
reuse CAMEL (Customized Applications for Mobile
network Enhanced Logic) services developed origi-
nally for GSM in IMS.
4 ARCHITECTURE
This section presents the proposed hybrid architecture
for the content delivery service within IMS. The con-
tent is distributed using the BitTorrent protocol, which
has proven to be robust and very scalable. The files
shared within the swarms are encrypted, which means
that they can be shared among the peers without al-
most any risk of unauthorized use. The DRM solu-
tion chosen for the architecture is OpenIPMP from
Mutable, which is an open source DRM solution that
includes a DRM server. Figure 3 depicts the proposed
architecture for the content delivery service. The big
arrow between the content access plane and the con-
tent distribution plane represents the interaction be-
tween both planes. Entities belonging to the con-
tent distribution plane (IMS/P2P clients) do interact
with components from the content access plane (e.g.
Trackers or DRM Application Servers). The IMS sig-
naling plane provides the typical features for user and
service management, which are user authentication,
charging, routing sip messages and storing the user
profile. The content distribution plane is composed
by peers forming torrent swarms. They communicate
with each other using the bitTorrent peer-wire proto-
col. Downloading files is performed within this plane
without using any central media server. Finally, the
content access plane provides the necessary elements
SIGMAP 2007 - International Conference on Signal Processing and Multimedia Applications
8