Sony Ericsson T290i, T290c manual MMS technical features, Architecture, Message conversion

White Paper T290i/T290c

MMS technical features

The MMS standard, just like SMS, offers store-and- forward transmission (instant delivery) of mes- sages, rather than a mailbox-type model. MMS is a person-to-person communications solution, mean- ing that the user gets the message directly into the mobile. Unlike SMS, the MMS standard uses WAP as its bearer protocol. MMS will take advantage of the high speed data transport technologies such as GPRS and support a variety of image, video and audio formats to facilitate a complete communica- tion experience.

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 inter- acts with the application being run on the MMS- enabled terminal to provide various messaging services. WAP is used as bearer of an MMS mes- sage between the MMS-C and the MMS client (application). The WAP Gateway is used for delivery and retrieval of messages.

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

Figure 4. The architecture of MMS

Message conversion

The MMS-C is able to perform limited message conversion - for example, from MMS to SMS - so that processing and air time is not wasted in send- ing messages to mobile terminals that do not have adequate capability to receive them. It also handles service aspects such as store and forward, guaran- teed delivery, subscriber preferences, operator

constraints, and billing information. The MMS-C also vouches for high quality messaging, e.g. by format conversion. This means that the MMS-C recognizes which formats are supported in the mobile phone, and adapts the MMS messages to these formats.

15 October 2004