There were three telco engineers.
One was confused.
Second one was unsure.
And the third one also worked with IMS.
The self-confidence is a key for a trainer. And honestly that’s what I lack with IMS. There are so many things, specifications, flows which I’m not sure about. I can read several different specs about one network functionality, each claiming something slightly different but all of them very vague about some particular feature I’m interested in. That’s why I like the wireshark. The problem is that even the traces can differ deployment to deployment, vendor to vendor. But at least that is something I can touch.
When I started with the RCS I’ve seen various callflows which contained some ‘AP’ or ‘AG’ box. This network function is an http or ws API (REST/SOAP/XCAP/any other) gateway into the IMS network. I was a bit confused, because always it was called by a different name and the function was not always the same. It took me some time to sort it out (at least partially ;)).
We’ve already seen one of those boxes – the Authentication Proxy. This time we will discuss the Aggregation and Cross-Network Proxies. The Authentication proxy is standardized by GSMA as VoLTE network function. In contrast to that the Aggregation Proxy is an RCS network element defined by OMA in XML Document Management specs.
Otherwise they are very similar and in practice they can be implemented within the same physical system as both of them are used to allow users to manipulate data over http without the need to go through the SBC.
Aggregation Proxy
And indeed, when we take a closer look, we can see (as stated in the specification) that for a 3GPP IMS or 3GPP2 MMD realisation, the XDM-3 and XDM-5 reference points correspond to the Ut reference point. In other words Aggregation and Authentication proxy are supposed to work in the same way from the UE perspective (e.g. we’ll use GAA or Http Digest for authentication). We can reuse the BSF and NAF functionality we have implemented for Authentication proxy. So if we know the Authentication Proxy we already know most of the stuff.
Real Time Communication 