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 for virtualized hardware and telephony function elasticity. As such, Telecom vendors have started 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 the deployment of a single software version on multiple cloud platforms thus allowing for a solution-based deployment. We also present a prototype we developed to study the characteristics of this architecture.