Hyper Heterogeneous Cloud-based IMS Software Architecture: A Proof-of-Concept and Empirical Analysis

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) defined by the 3GPP has been mainly developed and deployed by telephony vendors on vendor-specific hardware. Recent advances in Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) technology paved the way to virtualized hardware and telephony function elasticity. As such Telecom vendors start to embrace the cloud as a deployment platform usually selecting a privileged virtualization platform. Operators would like to deploy telecom functionality on their already existing IT cloud platforms. Achieving such flexibility would require the telecom vendors to adopt a software architecture allowing deployment on many cloud platforms or even heterogeneous cloud platforms. We propose a distributed software architecture enabling deploying a single version of software on multiple cloud platforms thus allowing for a solution based deployment. We also present a prototype we developed to study the characteristics of that architecture.