The biggest advantage of mobile operators – comparing to OTT applications – is that they are interconnected. No matter what country we are in we can connect into the network, we can place the calls, receive the calls, all under our own identity. We also don’t care in which network is our counterpart if he/she is now present in his/her home network or not. To achieve this operators need to support roaming and interworking. The IMS Roaming and Interworking Guidelines can be found in the GSMA IR.65 and LTE Roaming Guidelines in GSMA IR.88.
GSMA Statistics – Interconnections
We’ve mentioned the roaming when we discussed the SBC. In this post we’ll take a look on what options we have. So what can be the flows when one of the participants is not physically present in the home network and needs to be connected via some other infrastructure – the visited network.
Just recently the GSMA announced the first commercial interconnected VoLTE service in South Korea. This just illustrates how far we’re still from the real IMS-based roaming.
Update: GSMA Next-generation Interconnection and Roaming Analysis for Mobile Services
In general there are 3 options how we can implement roaming nowadays:
Roaming opt. 1
Firstly the roaming can be done in the packet core. The P-CSCF is in the home network. But that requires a mechanism which obtains the IP address of the A-SBC. This solution called S8 (reference point) Home Routing (S8HR) is very easy and maybe a bit preferred by operators these days because that’s a standard way for data roaming. However there are many open questions here related to Lawful Intercept, Emergency Calls, SRVCC, etc. GSMA works on a new variant of S8HR which is a part of the GSMA Network 2020 Programme and was recently as agreed as VoLTE Roaming candidate.
Real Time Communication 