Caching in I-CSCF of UMTS IP multimedia subsystem

The IP multimedia core network subsystem (IMS) provides multimedia services for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS). In IMS, any incoming call will first arrive at the interrogating call session control function (I-CSCF). The I-CSCF queries the home subscriber server (HSS) to identify the serving CSCF (S-CSCF) of the called mobile user. The S-CSCF then sets up the call to the called mobile user. This paper investigates the performance of the IMS incoming call setup. We also propose cache schemes with fault tolerance to speed up the incoming-call-setup process. Our study indicates that the I-CSCF cache can significantly reduce the incoming-call-setup delay, and checkpointing can effectively enhance the availability of I-CSCF.