Filter
Top Products
T68i
White Paper, April 2002
12
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.
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
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
sendingmessagestomobileterminalsthatdo
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.
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.
Figure 3. The architecture of MMS