IMS Mobile Business Communication Solution

Always in Touch with your Personal and Professional Contacts

 

A new era has begun in telecommunications with the recently standardized IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). IMS defines a generic architecture for offering Voice over IP and multimedia services seamlessly over wireless & wireline networks. It is being successfully promoted in the marketplace and adopted by a wide range of operators as the future architecture to provide new services.

 

Together with Alcatel’s business divisions, Alcatel’s research has prototyped a mobile IMS solution that addresses the communication issues of personal and professional users.

• Are they busy or could I call them right now?
• How can I reach them? 
• How could I organize a conference with two colleagues while I am off-site?

The IMS Mobile Business Communication solution provides a large range of communication resources for personal and professional usages:

• VoIP call,          
• GSM call
• Conferencing,
• Instant messaging,
• Push to Talk,
• E-mail & voice mail.

The user accesses his/her services thanks to a Dynamic Address Book, the unique user entry point to IMS services. The Dynamic Address Book automatically synchronizes itself with the network, ensuring that data is never lost. It provides presence information for a user-defined subset of contacts, including contact status, device type, and service availability. The user is directed to the most convenient way to reach a given contact, thanks to a presence-based dynamic service menu.

 

The application takes advantage of every available access network. The aim is to provide the user with the most powerful way of reaching contacts as soon as an access network is available. The network environment can be a residential, corporate or public WLAN or any operator’s mobile network (2.5G or 3G).     

With the IMS Mobile Business Communication solution, users

optimize and simplify their daily communications using a variety of IMS services that have been intelligently and transparently selected according to users’ availability criteria.

 

In addition, the solution extends the voice service supporting both IMS VoIP and GSM telephony standards, optimizing costs, typically by taking advantage of WLAN infrastructure.

 

Business users will find the IMS Mobile Business Communication solution to be the efficient solution to their on-site / off-site multi-user communication needs. 

The architecture relies on both the Alcatel IMS suite and the Alcatel My Teamwork solution, dedicated to enterprises.

• A mobile software client deployed on any user handset supporting Windows Mobile OS. The client has been tested on a wide range of devices.T
• The Alcatel IMS suite is enriched with an e-mail Front-End and a Control Notification Engine, for messaging services, interworking with the Alcatel Video Mail Box and a Mail Server.
• The Alcatel Advanced Communications server provides the server part for the Conferencing service.

   

^{Figure: Solution compliant with the IMS architectur and the Alcatel Portfolio}

  

John, a business traveller, is a heavy user of his always-on PDA for all his professional and personal communications.

 

While waiting in an airport lounge, he sends an e-mail to his colleague Ryan who appears as not available on the screen of his Dynamic Address Book.

 

Ryan, looking at the e-mail from John, considers the topic addressed by John as a priority. Therefore he switches his status to ‘available’ and sends an instant message to tell John to call him to discuss the topic of the e-mail.

 

John starts a conference with Ryan and Steve, an expert who can help them.Because John is not available to other callers during the conference, his wife Mary decides to leave him a voice mail; he is immediately notified of its arrival.

 

John will listen to Mary’s voice mail once the conference is over. 

 

 

^{Figure: A Smart IMS converged voice and messaging application for John}

 

• Unification of IMS and enterprise Presence.
• Smoothly integrated conversational and messaging services in terms of Reachability criteria.
• Global Push Mail mechanism based on IMS notification in the context of multiple public and enterprise mail servers. 
•  Conferencing functions complement the Instant Messaging multi-user chat room.

This project is funded by the EUREKA ITEA programs in the “SUMO” project. It represents one of the research initiatives underway in Alcatel’s Research & Innovation labs.

 

Contact: alcatel.publications@alcatel.com