Sony Ericsson T68ie MMS technical features, Message conversion, Architecture, OTA configuration

MMS technical features

The MMS standard, just like 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. He or she doesn’t 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 technologies EDGE and GPRS and support a variety of image, video and audio formats to facilitate a complete communication experience.

Figure 3. 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 sending messages to mobile terminals that do not have adequate capability to receive them. It also handles service aspects such as store and forward, guaranteed 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.

T68i

White Paper, April 2002

Architecture

The MMS Centre (MMS-C) is comprised of the MMS Server, the MMS Proxy-Relay and the MMS Store. The MMS Centre 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-e-mail, and supporting flexible addressing. The centre’s MMS Proxy- Relay interacts with the application being run on the MMS-enabled terminal to provide various messaging services. WAP is used as 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

OTA configuration

Users can easily get MMS into their phone. MMS supports OTA, meaning that the user does not have to configure the settings manually. The configuration is done by the operator.

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