Ericsson continues to work hard to increase the penetration of IMS terminals, focusing on specification of high-level IMS Java APIs and the Rich Communication Suite (RCS) initiative. It expects to see some tangible results later this year.
Stefan Svedberg, head of IMS Terminal Ecosystems at Ericsson, says the company is following two main tracks in its efforts to get IMS terminals out to the market. One of these is Ericsson’s involvement in the RCS program, an industry-wide initiative to speed up the introduction of interoperable rich communication mobile services, driven by the GSM Association and supported by more than 60 major telecom companies, including leading network operators, network-infrastructure vendors, and mobile-device vendors.
Svedberg has a lot of faith in the RCS program, which released its first service specification in December 2008. “A number of operators, including Orange, have announced plans to start RCS consumer trials as early as in the first half of 2009, involving several hundred subscribers,” he says. “We hope to see the first commercial launch of RCS terminals at the end of 2009.”
The second track is driving Java standardization of IMS APIs, exposing IMS functionality to developers. This effort currently comprises work on two Java Specification Requests (JSRs) – JSR 281 (IMS Services API) and JSR 325 (IMS Communication Enablers).
JSR 281 1.0 was released in July 2008, and a maintenance release is scheduled for the end of Q1 2009. “Several terminal vendors are now implementing 1.0 and we hope to see the first JSR 281 terminals on the market later this year,” Svedberg says.
JSR 281 defines the IMS Services API (IMSAPI), a Java API for the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) on end-user mobile devices. The API provides a toolbox of IMS building blocks which the developer can use to create IMS applications.
“This specification represents a big step forward and opens up possibilities to develop applications, which can run on many platforms, for Java feature phones exploiting advanced communication services, such as voice and video, without detailed knowledge of IMS,” Svedberg says.
To promote IMS and JSR 281, Ericsson has made a JSR 281 Reference Implementation available under Apache Version 2.0.
The goal of JSR 325 is to define a high abstraction level API for IMS Communication Enablers such as Presence, Group List Management and Instant Messaging (IM). It also provides an API for XDM that includes high abstraction level methods for presence lists (RLS), presence authorization rules and shared data.
The schedule for JSR 325 is:
- Public Review: Q1 2009
- Proposed Final Draft: Q3 2009
- Final Approval Ballot: Q3 2009
In paving the way for IMS terminals, Svedberg says cooperation with ST-Ericsson (formerly Ericsson Mobile Platforms) is important: “We work hard to ensure that the IMS development of the core network and the terminal platform is done in parallel, so that the IMS functionality we introduce in the core network has its correspondence in the terminal platform provided by ST-Ericsson.”
Svedberg also points at the Ericsson Developer Connection as an important part of Ericsson’s efforts to boost the interest in IMS and support development of IMS-based applications.
By Benny Ritzén
