MSF Releases Voice over LTE White Paper

The MultiService Forum (MSF) has published a whitepaper on its recent VoLTE (Voice over Long Term Evolution) Interoperability Event held with Vodafone and China Mobile.


Over 65 network elements from 19 participating vendors were tested by 60 test engineers using 200 pages of test plans during this three-week event. The test scenarios included 89 test cases and 561 scheduled tests based on different vendor combinations.


VoLTE calls and MMTel services were successfully completed within each host site and between host sites to demonstrate network inter-connect. LTE Roaming between host sites was successfully demonstrated with Diameter Routing Agents (DRA), enabling dynamic policy control between home and visited networks. Multi-vendor testing of UE, eNodeB, SeGW, EPC, IMS/MMTEL, DRA and PCC technology was conducted at each site.


The White Paper discusses the results of the VoLTE IOT event and identifies specific interoperability issues. All issues related to standards specifications were communicated to relevant organizations. It is important to identify and understand the factors that limit interoperability with commercially available equipment, from both a vendor and operator perspective. Vendors benefit from improved commercial viability of products and operators increase awareness of any interoperability issues relevant to vendor selection and deployment strategy.


“The MSF's event has demonstrated the growing degree of compliance with VoLTE definitions and the extent to which interoperability of implementations across the vendor community has progressed,�? said Dan Warren, Senior Director of Technology at the GSMA. “Not only was the testing itself a success, but the feedback from the event can be used to improve the specification of VoLTE and make sure that the level of interoperability in future products is even better than that demonstrated at this event.�?



The MSF will be partnering with ETSI and GSMA for a second VoLTE IOT event in 2012. The MSF also intends to focus on Rich Communication Suite and EPC conformance testing during the forthcoming year.

The 60-page whitepaper is available online. http://www.msforum.org/interoperability/VoLTE.shtml