Keynote Speaker

Prof. Thomas Magedanz

 Thomas Magedanz (PhD) is full professor in the electrical engineering and computer sciences faculty at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, leading the chair for next generation networks (www.av.tu-berlin.de). In addition, he is director of the “next generation network” division of the Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS (www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/NGNI ), which also provides a national Next Generation Network testbed in Germany. Since more than 18 years he is working in the convergence field of fixed and mobile telecommunications, the internet and information technologies, which resulted in many industry driven R&D projects centred around Next Generation Service Delivery platforms. In the course of his research activities he published more than 200 technical papers/articles. In addition, Prof. Magedanz is senior member of the IEEE, editorial board member of several journals.

Based on his long experience in the teaching complex IT and telecommunication technologies to different customer segments in an easy to digest way, Prof. Magedanz is a globally recognised technology coach. His employments as university professor and division head of a major German R&D organisation make him a prime choice for such trainings, as he is able to provide a non-biased presentation of the technologies. He regularly provides strategic and technology briefings for many tier 1 and 2 operators and major international telecom vendors. As well, he acts often as invited tutorial speaker at major telecom conferences and workshops around the world.

In 2006, Prof Magedanz has been assigned as Extraordinary Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Cape Town, South Africa (www.ee.uct.ac.za) and as Extraordinary Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment & Information Technology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa (www.ee.up.ac.za/en).

Since 2007, he is also Visiting Professor to the Department of Mathematics, Physics and Computing, Waterford Institute of Technology in Waterford, Ireland (www.wit.ie).

From Open Testbeds to Open Source Toolkits - Experiences from the FOKUS Open IMS Playground and an Introduction to the Open Source IMS Core System

The convergence of telecommunications, internet, entertainment and information technologies is creating a high degree of competition and new challenges for operators, manufacturers, integrators, application developers and the academia. In face of the increasing complexity of the service and network infrastructures open testbeds providing this infrastructure are considered key for bringing together different players of the new convergence value chain to do early prototyping and proof of concept implementations. However, testbeds are limited in their geographical reach and thus the distribution of related testbeds toolkits can be considered as an adequate means to extend the reach of testbeds to a global dimension. This keynote will give some insights into the FOKUS Open IMS Playground, a pioneering vendor and operator independent Next Generation Network testbed, which has been established in 2004 in Berlin Germany. This technology playground is based on a mix of own and various vendor IP Multimedia System (IMS) components on top of different fixed, mobile and cable networks and is used by various national and international network operators, vendors and application developers for prototyping fixed mobile convergence (FMC), triple/quadruple play and IP TV services. Based on the huge success of the testbed on the one hand, and due to the large demand for remote playground establishments around the globe, FOKUS has released at the end of 2006 the core part of this testbed as open source IMS core system toolkit via the berlios open source distribution site (www.openimscore.org). Now academic and industry players in the convergence field around the world can establish at reasonable costs their own IMS/NGN testbed and extend it by own and partner components to their individual needs. The talk introduces this open source IMS core system (OSIMS) and also provides a snapshot of the created development community and the future OSIMS roadmap. The talk ends with an outlook for the establishment of pan-European testbeds using OSIMS and gives an overview of respective European preparation activities, such as the IST project Panlab.