I remember when I started with artificial neural networks. I read two books describing the mathematical models. Theoretically I had all information I needed, still I had no clue how to make a program which would do something. Ā It took me quite some time to understand how to implement such a thing in C. Those were the days before the Internet and Google š Ā But even nowadays there is a long, long way from an IMS functional design to a real network deployment.
No, I’m not going to go through the virtualization and all the networking stuff. Instead we will look at one of the options for HSS implementation. Usually we understand the Home Subscriber Server (HSS) as a database which is providing a support and capabilities for User Identity Handling and User Security, Access Authorization, Mobile Management, Service Profile and Authorization. We can also use Subscriber Location Function (SLF) in order to map a particular subscriber to the right HSS or for loadsharing.
The definition above associates a big monolithic system, which often it is. However for some operators this can be impractical as they haveĀ to store a lot of information about their subscribers in several different databases, they have to introduce new provisioning procedures etc. Instead they could have just one ldap data-storage and the HSS would only work with the data from this database. And that’s exactly what is known as User Data Convergence (UDC) concept. In fact this is not limited only to the HSS, but the approach applies also to other systems as HLR, Provisioning Server, or ENUM. (Technicaly there can be also more than one LDAP database – e.g. we can have a dedicated cAAA LDAP database, etc.)
User Data Convergence – HSS-FE
In this case we don’t talk about HSS, but about HSS Front End (HSS-FE) and User Data Repository (UDR).Ā The interface between the HSS-FE and UDRĀ is calledĀ Ud and you can find its description in the 3GPPĀ TS29.335 and 3GPP TS23.335.
Real Time Communication 