In the fixed Internet world Instant Messaging services have proven to be quite popular. Now Instant Messaging services are moving to the mobile domain. The mobile terminal has become the personal trusted device, which is fast becoming the preferred access device to one’s services. The Value Proposition of Mobile Instant messaging consists of two elements
- Connectivity between the Internet and mobile world for interactive messaging
- The Always-On characteristics of today’s networks – immediate nature of message & presence exchange
Mobile operators see instant Messaging as an attractive service due to several reasons. First, there is a huge base of over 800 million fixed Instant-messaging users globally, today. Operators can connect their mobile users to these large established communities and offer messaging between Mobile & Fixed domains, driving up data revenues.
Second, Operators see interesting possibilities of enhancing the user experience and bringing in cost-efficiencies, by easily integrating IMPS services with other existing operator and/or 3 rd party VAS applications. Extending this further to introducing new communication services, is the next step.
Third, Instant Messaging is fast becoming a core application on mobile phones – the key to mass market usage of mobile IM. Major phone vendors have introduced handsets with embedded IM Clients based on the OMA IMPS specifications. Add to this the availability of compact, low-memory footprint downloadable J2ME IMPS clients that can be downloaded and used on a wide range of standard Java-enabled handsets, and Mobile IM is not far from becoming a truly ubiquitous mobile application.
Mobile operators need a robust IMPS infrastructure that can offer standards-based interoperable IMPS services, can ensure user privacy, and effect flexible billing models. They need the IMPS infrastructure to sport an open architecture that can easily accommodate extensions for enhancing the user experience with existing and new VAS application integration and newer communication services.
Jataayu IMPS Platform
Jataayu jIMPS Platform is a carrier-grade solution enabling Carriers to immediately deploy a robust, standards-compliant Instant Messaging and Presence Services (IMPS) platform.
The jIMPS is a cost effective solution that easily integrates into the Carrier’s network environment and operational systems. It also provides a mechanism to integrate IMPS services with other service offerings as well as interoperate with other IMPS Servers.
jIMPS Server
The jIMPS server provides the core IMPS functionality. The jIMPS server consists of components, which provide the core functionality of Instant Messaging, Presence, Groups, Value added services, and interfaces for communication with various types of clients for providing these services.
The jIMPS gateway is responsible for interoperability with other IM servers. The jIMPS gateway communicates with different IM servers and gateways, which can be proprietary IM servers, other standards based jIMPS servers, or the jIMPS server- facilitating the communication of IM users across different external communities.
Downloadable J2ME jIMPS Client
In addition to the jIMPS Server and jIMPS Gateway, Jataayu offers downloadable J2ME mobile IMPS client applications based on the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) specifications. These clients are ideal for mobile operators looking to kick-start launch of mobile IMPS services. These can be downloaded and used on a wide range of standard Java-enabled handsets supporting MIDP 2.0.
Jataayu’s downloadable J2ME mobile IMPS clients are a result of its superior expertise and understanding of mobile IMPS and handset technology. Coming form a compact code base the J2ME clients require very little memory, and provide end-users with a true always-on mobile IM experience. The J2ME Mobile IM clients can also be customized in a variety of ways to suit the needs of mobile operators and handset makers.
Jataayu jIMPS Platform enables Carriers to offer a rich communication experience to their subscribers. Salient functionality supported is as below:
Contact List
Users are able to manage their contact lists by searching for individuals and groups and adding new users to their contact list. Users can manage multiple contact lists such as a list of friends and a list of colleagues.
Presence Management
Presence is a key attribute that is used to describe the status of availability of the user. Users can check this information before initiating any communication. The jIMPS Server allows users to control their own presence information and to whom this presence information is made available. Full privacy can be maintained by requiring users to ask for permission before viewing the presence status of another user. Jataayu jIMPS Server provides a mechanism for introducing other service opportunities that can leverage off and use this presence information. The jIMPS server can be configured to receive presence updates from mobile operator networks, in addition to users updating their presence information.
Instant Messaging
The jIMPS Server enables users to send instant messages. The recipients of the messages can be either one or more individual IMPS users or a group of users in a particular contact list. Similarly users are able to receive instant messages from individual senders or a group.
Both Push and Notification/Pull delivery modes are supported. Push-type delivery is usually used with short textual messages. The Notification/Pull type delivery is effected for messages with multimedia and other large content. A notification of the message is sent to the recipient who then retrieves the message from the jIMPS server.
When an IMPS user sends a message to another IMPS user who is offline (not logged on to the IMPS Server) the messages are stored and available in the Server, for a configurable period. When the recipient logs on next, the messages are made available.
Group Communication
The jIMPS Server supports group features that allow the carrier to form communities of IMPS users. Both Public and Private Chat groups are supported.
Private groups are formed by individual users. The creator of the group is able to control how the group is accessible by others –whether the private group is open for anyone to join or only specific users may join. The visibility of the group may be restricted from other users. A Public group is a user group that is formed by the administrator. The administrator can control the group in the same way the owner of the private group can.
VAS Application Integration Framework
The jIMPS Server allows unique functionality for easy integration of existing operator and/or 3 rd party VAS applications to IMPS Services. The jIMPS Server provides an API set (Application Processor Interface) that allows applications to mimic an IMPS user. This means that users can send and receive messages to/from VAS applications.
jIMPS Platform provides a ready-to-use VAS Application integration Framework that allows already existing VAS applications to be quickly integrated. Additional new VAS applications when available, can be similarly integrated.
Sample applications like SMS keyword application are available, as part of the complete jIMPS Platform solution.
The jIMPS Server supports extensive interoperability with other IMPS systems. Rapid adoption of IMPS services is possible only when users of one IMPS system are able to access users of other mobile or fixed IMPS systems.
- Interoperability with other OMA IMPS compliant systems is ensured by employing the OMA IMPS Server-to-Server (SSP) protocol
- Interoperability with other instant messaging or presence systems is ensured by providing SSP Gateways. The SSP Gateways provide a mechanism for translating SSP to XMPP, SIMPLE or other proprietary protocols.
The Jataayu jIMPS Server is based on OMA IMPS Ver 1.2 specifications and offers a comprehensive functionality set for Presence and Instant messaging Services. It provides full backward compatibility with the Wireless Village 1.1 specifications.
Jataayu jIMPS Server is designed to provide services with a very high degree of reliability and performance. Clustered architecture based on carrier grade systems lends itself to scaling for higher performance as well as to provide fault-tolerance. The distributed system components allow system to be upgraded and maintained with least system downtime.
Scalability
Jataayu offers reliable and highly available jIMPS Server platforms that can scale in tandem with customer traffic. Standard configurations benchmarked and optimized for Linux and Solaris platforms, are available from Jataayu.
- Entry Level
- Mid-Range
- High-End
Due to our extensive benchmarking, optimization and tuning efforts on Sun Solaris and Linux (Intel Xeon, Intel Itanium series), we are able to offer optimal configurations for every sizing need.
Jataayu jIMPS Server offers high availability for all deployment configurations consisting of a minimum failover cluster to ensure highest degree of service availability. If required, an (N+1) expanded configuration through a parallel cluster can be provided offering additional performance, scalability and availability that ensures no degradation in system performance even in the case of a server failure.
Multiple servers hosting cluster-aware service components provide enhanced performance, scalability and availability. The Clustering software automatically manages the failover tasks with minimum service downtime.
Jataayu jIMPS server has been designed to easily incorporate an operators billing plan. Jataayu jIMPS server supports both Pre-paid and Post-paid Billing mechanisms. Administrators are able to configure the events for which the billing CDRs are to be generated. B oth per-message, per session billing and subscription based billing mechanisms are supported.
Jataayu jIMPS can interface with standard Provisioning systems provided in the operator network. Subscribers can be provisioned on the jIMPS server for enabling the set of services as registered in the Provisioning system based on the Auto Provisioning and Subscription information available.
Jataayu jIMPS Server allows interfacing with any industry standard NMS system over SNMP. This allows centralised management of WAP Gateway along with other network infrastructure. A SNMP plug-in is provided for the IMPS Server. The SNMP Module facilitates sending application specific alarms when the threshold of resource utilization is reached. This allows Resource status monitoring such as Memory, Disk Space, Active thread counts, Database utilization.
A detailed and user-friendly GUI is provided which can be used for Operation, Administration and Maintenance. The GUI text is in simple user-friendly language so that it can be easily understood by a wide range of administrators. Each section also comes along with an online help page that provides detailed explanations and example values of the parameters that are configurable in that section. Statistics of all activities in the jIMPS Server is provided. A Graphical Reporting Tool is optionally available to provide Real-Time Graphs of all the activities in the IMPS Server.
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