Lucent's recent announcement that it had upgraded its "Super Distributed Home Location Register" wireless customer data management system is serious evidence that wireless roaming is entering a new era--and so must methods of handling the information needed for things like authorizing roaming, determining preferences and billing.
At its 2003 introduction, SDHLR's main function was to consolidate the traditional cellular customer information databases known as home location registers (HLRs). The new version is also compatible with IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and other mobile technology. It amounts to an argument by Lucent that any roaming system now has to be ready to handle at least three types of customer roaming databases.
IMS may be the most important of these. Developed under the Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), IMS is an ambitious effort aimed at unifying various sorts of mobile IP-based services. Under IMS, users can move easily between applications, perhaps beginning with a voice call then moving to shared Web browsing and then to video conferencing.
These so-called "blended services" can all happen in the same session, without the need to disconnect from one service to use another. Sprint is the first U.S. wireless carrier to have announced plans to implement IMS. At least two European carriers have also done so, with more likely to follow both in the U.S. and around the world (Ericsson claims to have 25 signed contracts to supply IMS equipment).
INCREASED COMPLEXITY
IMS will by itself make the task of handling wireless customer data a lot more complex. But the job gets even more complicated with the addition of another kind of wireless roaming that's in the works: seamlessly moving from cellular service to wireless VoIP via Wi-Fi hot spots using dual-mode cellular/Wi-Fi phones.
The problem is in the way the various wireless networks store the customer information. "IMS provides a consistent way to manage profiles and data across multiple network elements," says Von McConnell, director of IMS services at Sprint. Although vendors interpret the IMS architecture differently, its general approach is to put all the relevant customer information and preferences in one database, or set of databases, called the home subscriber server (HSS). And that is crucial to the ability to deliver the blended services.
"If each user profile exists in the specific application and the database associated with that application, and you keep having to do a lookup during the call flow, it becomes very complicated," says Jeff Cortley, Lucent product management director. "The user experience is not very elegant, because you have delay every time you try to move from one service type to another. Having the single subscriber profile database to go to is one of the key enablers, so that you can always go to that one data repository and look up the information about the user and the service."
But while the HSS approach will do the trick for IMS services, conventional 2G or 3G networks store customer data in the traditional HLRs, while Wi-Fi networks use so-called authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) databases. That multiplicity of approaches created the need for Lucent's SDHLR version.
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