Feasibility study on service domain centralization
The objective of this Technical Report is to study and specify potential modifications to the ICS architecture in order to enable all services to be controlled via IMS rather than via CS legacy mechanisms (single service domain), for all subscribers of a network and also for inbound roamers.
As part of Release 8, 3GPP developed the concept of IMS Centralized Services which was then further extended in Release 9. While the goal of ICS was to enable an operator to provide communication services (such that all services and service control are centralized based on IMS mechanisms) on a per-subscriber basis, it has however not seen widespread deployment, as support of both domains is still necessary.
To achieve the goal of fully centralizing services and service control in the IMS domain, network based solutions will be studied that address the key issues and architectural assumptions defined in this document. In addition, these potential solutions will be evaluated against the existing mechanisms available in 3GPP technical specifications, before deciding whether to make changes to the relevant technical specifications.