MSF Launches NGN Certification Program with Iometrix

The MultiService Forum confirmed plans to launch an NGN Certification Program and announced its selection of Iometrix as the host test lab. An initial pilot program is set to deliver results as early as Q4 2007.



The MSF said its Certification Program will focus on areas of critical interest to both vendor and service provider members of the MSF, addressing key issues necessary to deliver multi-vendor practical open architecture solutions for Next Generation Networks (NGNs).



The pilot program, scheduled for Q4 this year, will concentrate on verifying the technical components of RTCP implementations in media gateways and SIP end points, and the accuracy of the network statistics that they report. The RTP/RTCP protocol addresses the measurement and reporting of network quality for real-time applications such as VoIP, and any differences in implementation or faulty reporting between the very large number and types of nodes running these protocols would seriously degrade the network operation and damage application performance.



The NGN network components subject to certification in the pilot phase include SIP endpoints and SIP phones, residential gateways (CPE), access gateways, trunking gateways, media servers and session border gateways. The test scenarios include point-to-point calls -- initiating calls between software under test and emulated endpoint and verifying that basic RTCP jitter, delay, packet loss, packet duplication and short calls are reported correctly by the end systems -- as well as complex calls, verifying that a mixer maintains the correct RTCP statistics for each RTP sessions it supports. Also, when a destination endpoint is changed, verifying that the end-point clears the statistics for the old media path and reports the statistics accurately for the new media path.

http://www.msforum.orghttp://www.iometrix.com/