 Now that we all agree that service provisioning through IMS is the way forward for NGN based service creation and delivery. We need to look at how the overall physical network architecture of for service provisioning is designed. It is known as the multimedia communication center or MCC. It has some liking to the data center which provides access to data. So again here it is an access based network for certain services to be offered. So we are going to look at a standardized view on MCC. We look at how threading or multiple client parallel support can be realized through agents and then we look at some functional and non-functional requirements which are mandatory for MCC to achieve in order to make it scalable, sustainable and efficient. So the MCC is essentially a standardized way for accessing services. These services are basically the information services which are invoked by either the user or an intermediary like a proxy agent that works on behalf of a user. Now this customer or a user which communicates with MCC can have access to the services which are backend services or which are sometimes actually involved or engaged with the customer. For instance, the IVR, the interactive voice response system or the interactive video and voice response system is an example where the IVR servers are placed in the multimedia communication center where this service is invoked when a certain condition requires the IVR to interact with the customer. Since we are talking about customers not in a few dozen or thousands but probably millions. In that case, the customers would all have to be facilitated in a one-on-one fashion. That is a customer should feel a prioritized and customized service. For that, the concept of agents or some kinds of threading mechanism is introduced where each agent talks to a customer in a one-on-one basis. So it means some kind of agent which is class-based object can be thought about where multiple customers can be treated in parallel through multiple agents which are created on the fly. For instance, if a certain chat service is to be utilized like for instance Skype or WhatsApp, in that case multiple agents have to be provisioned to cater for individual customers. When this happens, it actually means that the MCC is now going to have a business relationship. This business relationship implies billing and charging. For that, we need to look at the stakeholders which would be now involved with the communication center. It is the customer itself, the enterprise which houses such MCC and the network provider or the NGN operator which connects the customer with the enterprise in which the multimedia communication center is placed. It means that this business relationship would generate business opportunities and revenues and it would result into a very thriving ecosystem. Now let's look at some requirements. These requirements are scalable and these requirements are never-ending but for the sake of brevity, we are going to look at the requirements of the multimedia communication center which look pretty much the requirements like any other large data center or server farm. The first one is extensibility. So the MCC has to be an extensible or an expandable system for an increasing number of users. If more servers are required to be deployed or if more customers have to be catered for then extensibility has to be ensured. Then some kind of flexible variety offering model has to be introduced where the large telecommunication organizations, medium-sized business sectors and small enterprises are all entertained and accommodated by this communication center. Then the accessibility through wired wireless mobile heterogeneous environment in a transparent manner has to be ensured. The multimedia traffic delivery has to be transparently and seamlessly provided because the nature of multimedia communication center actually implies that any kind of information can be delivered. Sometimes the multimedia communication center can also be deployed in non-IMS networks. This is not very frequent but in case it is deployed then some kind of backward compatibility also has to be ensured. Let's look at the complete end-to-end deployment scenario of the MCC as a network. We see here that we have different servers. Each server has its own functionality. Let's name a few. We have the application server. We have the unified service broker function that identifies the nature of service that a customer is looking for and returns the addressing information through which a customer can actually reach out to the server from which it can get the service. Then there is the log server that maintains all the transactions which are taking place over this network. Then there is the communication telephony integration function which is some kind of multimedia telephony like voice over IP, video over IP, multimedia messaging mechanism is provided. So the communication telephony integration function actually ensures that the customer is connected to the right kind of service in an integrated manner. Then there is the operation and maintenance server which keeps the network in operationally viable state. Now this is the MCC. Now the MCC network is connected externally to the IMS core via the border gateway and the software control management function and the multimedia call distribution function. Let's discuss them each briefly. The software control management actually implies the invocation, revocation, grant, deny kind of mechanisms for software access and software management for all the software modules and software functions which are provided by the MCC network. Then we have the call distribution function which is the multimedia content call if it is between two parties or if it's a conference call then some kind of connectivity has to be ensured between the calling party and the call party in a one-on-one or one-to-many situations. So you see here that we have the multimedia communication center which is connected to the IMS core through these entities like SCMF, MCDF and the service support function and through border gateway. Now you see here that the dotted line is actually the signaling and the continuous line is actually showing the flow of user information or user traffic. This all sums up how our agents which is actually the customer agents are now talking to the users via the firewall in order to make sure that each customer gets a prioritized treatment.