T68i
White Paper, April 2002
12
MMS technical features
The MMS standard,just like SMS, offers store-
and-forwardtransmission (instant delivery) of
messages,rather than a mailbox-type model.
MMS is a person-to-personcommunications
solution, meaning that the user gets the message
directly into the mobile. He or she doesn’t have to
callthe server to get the message downloaded to
the mobile.Unlike SMS, the MMS standard uses
WAPas its bearer protocol. MMS will take
advantageof the high speed data transport
technologiesEDGE and GPRS and support a
varietyof image, video and audio formatst o
facilitatea complete communication experience.

Architecture

The MMS Centre(MMS-C) is comprised of the
MMSServer, the MMS Proxy-Relay and the MMS
Store.The MMS Centre is the central element of
the MMS network architecture, providing storage
andoperational support, enabling instantdelivery
of multimediamessages from terminal-to-
terminaland terminal-to-e-mail, and supporting
flexible addressing. The centre’s MMS Proxy-
Relay interacts with the application being run on
the MMS-enabledterminal to provide various
messagingservices. WAP is used as bearer of an
MMS message between the MMS-C and the
MMS client (application). The WAP Gateway is
used fordelivery and retrieval of messages

Message conversion

The MMS-Cis able to perform limited message
conversion- for example, from MMS to SMS - so
that processing and air time is not wasted in
sendingmessagestomobileterminalsthatdo
not have adequatecapability 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
qualitymessaging, e.g. by format conversion.
This means thatthe MMS-C recognizes which
formats aresupported in the mobile phone, and
adapts theMMS messages to these formats.

OTAconfigura tion

Users can easilyget MMS into their phone. MMS
supports OTA,meaning that the user does not
have to configure the settings manually. The
configurationis done by the operator.
Figure 3. The architectureof MMS