Streaming content in MMS, Benefits with MMS

expression in communication messaging. Rather than sending a downloaded birthday jingle in EMS, a user can, for example, send a clip of his or her own personal rendition of “Happy Birthday”.

Pictures and themes

By using the integrated camera, users can take a picture and immediately send it to a recipient. The ability to send pictures is one of the most exciting attributes of MMS, as it allows users to share meaningful moments with friends, family and colleagues.

Mobile picture transmission also offers inestimable utility in business applications, from sending on-site pictures of a construction project to capturing and storing an interesting design concept for later review. Editing a picture by adding text allows users to create their own electronic postcards, an application that is expected to substantially cut into the traditional postcard market.

Themes (downloaded or pre-defined) can be exchanged via MMS.

PIM communication with MMS

By using MMS, it is easy to handle PIM (Personal Information Manager) information. The user can send and receive business cards (vCard), calendar entries such as appointments (vCal) and notes (vNotes).

Streaming content in MMS

Streaming makes it possible to view files as they are being downloaded to the phone. The MPEG-4 file format can be used for continuous media along the entire delivery chain envisaged by the MMS, independent of whether the final delivery is done by streaming or download, thus enhancing interoperability.

In particular, the following stages are considered:

•Upload from the originating terminal to the MMS proxy.

•File exchange between MMS servers.

•Transfer of the media content to the receiving termi- nal, either by file download or by streaming. In the first case, the self-contained file is transferred, whereas in the second case the content is extracted from the file and streamed according to open payload formats. In this case, no trace of the file format remains in the content that is transmitted over the wire or over the air.

Additionally, the MPEG-4 file format can be used for storage in servers and the “hint track” mechanism can be used to prepare for streaming.

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Benefits with MMS

By allowing the mobile phone to serve as an image processor and conveyor, Multimedia Messaging accommodates the exchange of important visual information as readily as it facilitates fun. Business and leisure usage of MMS will be dynamically merged, resulting in enhanced personal efficiency for users and increased network activity for operators. In short, MMS affords total usage for total communication.

As MMS uses WAP as its bearer technology and is being standardized, it has wide industry support and offers full interoperability. This is a major benefit to service providers and end users. Gradual steps in messaging evolution and the continuity of user experience has resulted in an ease-of-use where interoperability is assured.

The MMS server, through which MMS messages are sent, supports flexible addressing (to both normal phone numbers (MSISDN) and email accounts), which makes the user interface more friendly and allows greater control for operators. The MMS server, moreover, is responsible for the instant delivery feature of MMS.

MMS technical features

The MMS standard, just like that of SMS, offers store- and-forward transmission (instant delivery) of messages, rather than a mailbox-type model. MMS is a person-to- person communications solution, meaning that the user gets the message directly into the mobile phone. He or she does not have to call the server to get the message downloaded to the mobile. Unlike SMS, the MMS standard uses WAP as its bearer protocol. MMS will take advantage of the high speed data transport technology EDGE/GPRS and support a variety of image, video and audio formats to facilitate a complete communications experience.

Architecture

The MMS Center (MMS-C) is comprised of the MMS Server, the MMS Proxy-Relay and the MMS Store. The MMS Center is the central element of the MMS network architecture, providing storage and operational support, enabling instant delivery of multimedia messages from terminal-to-terminal and terminal-to-email, and supporting flexible addressing. The center’s MMS Proxy-Relay interacts with the application being run on the MMS-enabled terminal to provide various messaging services. WAP is used as the bearer of an MMS message between the MMS-C and the MMS client (application). The WAP Gateway is used for delivery and retrieval of messages.

June 2004