Personal Networks as Distributed Clients for IMS

A Personal Network (PN) connects nearby and remote devices a user owns: at home, at work in the car, on his body. It enables the user to secure and easily consume services spanning these devices. Although the PN and the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) have quite complementary architectures and goals, it was the aim of this work to investigate the business and technical use cases that would allow the two systems to interoperate. We could show that, besides wide area connectivity, IMS can support PNs with basic services from its group, presence, profile and call control enablers. The PN complements the IMS services with its ability for personalized and user-centric service delivery. This offers an interesting service proposition for mobile and FMC users