Exoticus: An IMS experimentation testbed Experimentation methodology and environment for IP applications

Exoticus is a French consortium lead by the Bell Labs including industrials, SMEs and academic partners. Exoticus aims at helping the telecommunication operators to develop the IMS offer, in order to face the competition of Internet actors on the market of convergent IP services. The main challenges are to provide flexibility for IMS service creation and to early prototype innovative convergent IP services. Exoticus proposes an IMS testbed that implements mechanisms for service composition. Exoticus also proposes an experimentation methodology, to run IMS services experiments on the testbed. Both the Exoticus IMS testbed and the experimentation methodology are presented in this paper.