Heading for Multimedia Message Service in 3G

With the operation of General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and emergence of Third Generation (3G) networks, the demand for the broadband wireless service is massively increased. Standard value-added services such as voice mail, Short Message Service (SMS) have been extended to some richer data exchange services which include email access and Multimedia Message Service (MMS). With MMS which is an evolution of SMS, the multimedia contents - text, images, audio clips and even video clips - can be exchanged between any GPRS/3G subscribers. The message can be constructed by GPRS/3G-supported mobile phones and submitted within a few seconds, which is the conventional way to use this messaging service. More conveniently, protocols can be used such as HTTP, SMTP to provide access to this service too. A practical implementation of MMS is addressed in this paper. Various protocols are supported by this MMS Gateway for inbound and outbound message transaction. This MMS Gateway is considered as a quick-response, stable and scalable MMS system, enabling the easy exchange of multimedia contents between Internet users and GPRS/3G subscribers. The architecture of this MMS Gateway is depicted in this paper and the features of this messaging system are presented.