2 The founding: Release 5 and the ring of work around it

2.1 A row before a document

3GPP work does not begin with text. It begins with a row in the work plan: a short name, a title, the groups expected to do it, and a pointer at the paper a plenary approved to open it. A plenary is the meeting of a whole technical body that says yes; the writing happens afterwards, in the working groups.

From that moment every document filed about the work carries the short name — the acronym. Searching by acronym is how any of this is found again, and it is what every count in this course is built on.

For this subject the first row is the plainest one there is. Its acronym is bare IMS, its title is "Provisioning of IP-based multimedia services", and it is a single row. The work plan points at the paper SP-000216, written for meeting SP-8. IMS SP-000216

2.2 What the founding paper said it would do

The paper's own title is missing, but the work item description behind it survives, and it is quotable. Its objective is two sentences.

Two things in that are worth stopping on. "Multiple media components per call" is the ambition in four words — more than one kind of media inside a single call. And "based on existing multimedia call control standards" says the work was not setting out to invent its own protocol. ^[1]

The justification is one sentence long, and it is a statement about services rather than about technology.

Note the mismatch, because you will meet it again. The work item description speaks of Release 2000 and R00; the work plan row it belongs to is marked Rel-5. Both are in the record and neither explains the other. IMS ^[2]

2.3 The thirteen rows around it

Fourteen work plan rows in this subject are marked Rel-5, and the founding row is one of them ^[4]. The other thirteen are the pieces a call needs before anybody can make one.

Acronym	The title on the row	Groups the row names
IMS IMS	Provisioning of IP-based multimedia services	NP, R5, S1, S2, S3, S5, T1, T3
IMS-ASEC IMS-ASEC	Access Security for IMS	S3, T3
IMS-LI IMS-LI	IMS Lawful Interception	S3
IMS-CCR IMS-CCR	Call control and roaming to support IMS in UMTS	R5, S2
IMS-CCR-IWMM IMS-CCR-IWMM	Impact on MM/CC/SM	N1
IMS-CAMEL IMS-CAMEL	CAMEL control of IMS services	N2
IMS-ONOSA IMS-ONOSA	Support of VHE/OSA by entities and protocols of the IMS (e.g. CSCF)	N5
IMS-OAM IMS-OAM	Charging and OAM&P for IMS	S5
IMS-CODEC IMS-CODEC	Multimedia codecs and protocols for conversational PS services	S4
IMS-TEST IMS-TEST	Conformance Test Aspects - Provisioning of IMS	T1
IMS-CCR_Test IMS-CCR_Test	Conformance Test Aspects – IMS Call Control	R5
IMS_CONV_IP_COM-UEConTest IMS_CONV_IP_COM-UEConTest	UE Conformance Test Aspects – IMS for Converged IP Communications	R5
IMS-FrWk IMS-FrWk	IMS Framework Report (work stopped)	S1
IMS-Sex IMS-Sex	Service Examples (Work stopped)	S1

The shape of that list is the argument of this whole course in one table. A new way of making a call is never one piece of work. It is security, interception, call control, roaming, charging, management, codecs and conformance testing, each opened as its own row and most of them landing on a different group.

Two of the fourteen carry the words "work stopped" inside the title itself. That is somebody writing a note by hand into a name; there is no field anywhere in the record that says whether a work item is running, stopped or finished. IMS-FrWk IMS-Sex

The group codes on those rows are the ones the row carries. Several of them — the codes beginning N and T — appear nowhere in the group map of Who does the work: fourteen groups, and a core-network shape, and the record does not say which of the names still stand or what became of them.

2.4 The codecs came in the same release

One of the fourteen is worth its own quotation, because it shows how narrowly a row is written. IMS-CODEC's row names one group, S4 — the codec group, which Who does the work: fourteen groups, and a core-network shape lists as SA4. IMS-CODEC SA4

A codec is the thing that turns sound or picture into bytes and back. The row promises two things and no more: pick the default ones, and work out which of the surrounding pieces are SA4's to write rather than somebody else's. ^[3]

Its own text guesses at the release number too — "Release 2000 (likely to become Release 4)" — while the row sits under Rel-5. Nothing in the record settles that, and this course does not either.

2.5 Why the numbers in this course cannot see any of this

Every document count in this course is a count of meeting documents in a store on this machine, and that store's work item labelling begins on 2015-01-23 ^[5]. The Rel-5 rows above carry planned days from 2000.

So the document counts on these rows are nearly empty. The row called IMS has one document against it and IMS-CODEC has four. IMS IMS-CODEC Those are not measurements of how much work was done at the time — they are what reached a store whose work item labelling begins in 2015.

The planned start and finish days on a row are the plan's own bookkeeping and never a record of what happened. Sixteen of the rows in this subject carry the same planned start day, 2009-05-29, across releases years apart.

2.6 Where this goes next

The founding row is the only one of the fourteen this course quotes at length. What happened afterwards is the interesting part: the same system sent back to the drawing board for each new kind of network.

That is Rebuilt for every new network: circuits, LTE, the browser, 5G, and the groups who did it are Who does the work: fourteen groups, and a core-network shape.