Presence Functionality Approach to Achieve Fixed Mobile Converged Services

The mobility of users of Internet services, smarter phones and mobile networks with more coverage and broadband are synergistically driving towards overall global IP connectivity. In order to reach Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC), personalization is a key feature in providing advanced services that are of value to customers. The user community's acceptance of FMC services will motivate industry and operators to collectively embrace global connectivity. Presence information, which was initially designed to describe the willingness of users to communicate with others, has become a powerful tool for personalizing services that manage user communications. We propose a logical presence functionality running as a presence proxy that can be integrated into a home gateway or femtocell as a value-added service or in the operator network. This presence proxy permits users to manage their presence and establish communication and privacy models in a personalized way. An important feature of this solution is that it enables presence traffic to be optimized if necessary. In addition, the proxy is able to integrate functions to make Internet access or multimedia sessions easier or more efficient for users.