Facilitating the adoption and use of the IP Multimedia System

Abstract: The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is still under development and not widely adopted in the market. Some companies are reluctant to deploy IMS and some telecommunications vendors believe that IMS will not achieve a desirable market share. The purpose of this thesis work is to give a boost to this technology (i.e., to accelerate its market growth) by providing the community (both developers and operators who might adopt this technology) with an evaluation of the Ericsson Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) called Mobile Java Communication Framework (MJCF) APIs. Developers with or even without knowledge of the IMS architecture and signaling should be able to use these interfaces in order to develop applications on top of IMS. A client-server application is designed and implemented to facilitate this evaluation and to serve as an example for others. The motivation behind this application is the every day needs of the people who search for discounts while they are shopping. Users set up their profile by specifying their preference concerning discounts for specific products; while shop owners publish discounts. When a user is near a store which offers interesting discounts (i.e., discounts that match their profile) new notifications will be sent to his/her mobile device. This application exploits the MJCF APIs and uses several of its basic functions; specifically subscriptions, messages, notifications, and publications are some of the messages that can be utilized through these interfaces.</p> Throughout the application development, bugs were found in the APIs and corrections were suggested for the documentation. Measurements were made in order to evaluate the memory utilization and delay associated with these APIs. It was observed that the delays added by the APIs are somewhat high and may negatively affect the experience of users. However memory utilization seamed to be low for client applications and quite high for the server side given the resources of today's services and cellular phones.