Toward A Full Implementation of Location Enabled Service Framework in IMS Infrastructure

Abstract

IMS  has  been  widely  recognized  as  the control  and brokering framework for  delivering  of the blended communication and multimedia services to the fix  and  mobile  IP users. However, until  recently,  most of IMS services have been developed and deployed in a manner  that  does  not  carefully  consider  how  these services can  be combined  and interact  with  each  other in a beneficial way. Services can often overlap in terms of the logic that they execute, causing of redundant code across several application servers. In reference to OMA recommendation,  we  developed  a  hybrid  approach  to divide services into two  categories of  user services and enabling  services.  In  that  regard  and  in  scope  of  our national  research  project,  we  had  proposed  and prototyped  several  service  enablers  for  a  composited and  intelligent  service  platform  using  IMS infrastructure.  In  this  paper,  we  are  detailing  of  the proposed  design  of  a  Location  Enabler  and  its interaction  with  other  functional  blocks  of  IMS framework  to  provide  the  advanced  location  enabled services  to  end  users.  The  so-called  Location  Enabler collects data  about  the  geographical position  of  mobile terminals  and  provided  this  information  to  requesting services/clients,  via  application  server  platform.  Since location  data  can  be  regarded  as  a  type  of  presence information, we propose an architecture that builds on the  IMS  presence  specifications.  We  show  that  several mechanisms  for  processing  presence  like  notification handling,  access  control  and  privacy  management apply to location data as well. It is therefore possible to reuse a large part of the IMS presence infrastructure.