Now, though, the Forum wants to go a step further by enabling equipment providers to submit their technology for a lab-test-based certification process that will show their products meet specified technical levels that carriers can rely on when building an NGN. The MSF has appointed test house Iometrix Inc. , best known for its work with the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) , as its certification partner.

    The RTCP problem

    The certification process is starting with a set of pilot tests, involving unidentified MSF members, that will focus on implementations of RTCP (RTP Control Protocol) in residential gateways, access and trunking gateways, media servers, session border controllers, and SIP devices. RTCP provides performance measurement information about RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol) flows, which carry audio and video packets over IP networks.

    Variability in RTCP reporting has been identified as a major concern by the MSF's carrier members, BT in particular.

    Iometrix will verify the technical components of RTCP in the equipment tested, and measure the accuracy of the reported network statistics generated by the network elements and SIP end points.

    "The consequences ofa poor implementation of RTCP can be very damaging in an NGN rollout," stated Bob Mandeville, president of Iometrix, in a media briefing about the scheme. "The statistics RTCP generates are very important."

    Chris Gallon, head of systems engineering at Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe Ltd. and a member of the MSF board, notes that RTCP helps to produce vital statistics on jitter and delay, providing real-time analysis of network performance and feeding information into other operational and business systems, such as billing engines.

    "We need to be able to trust the RTCP statistics, so we can figure out what's going wrong and why," said Gallon. "If the statistics generated are wrong, it can waste a lot of time and money." The certificates the MSF will award will help carriers to know that the measurements from certified equipment can be trusted and be used to underpin measurement and troubleshooting strategies, he added.