Methodological Introduction of Context Awareness in the Design of 3GPP Conversational Services

By complementing basic call services, supplementary services totalling nowadays more than twenty different functions, have a long history crossing the main areas of telecommunications from ISDN via ETSI GSM, ETSI TISPAN to finally end at 3GPP and GSMA. They are commonly used in professional settings while their usage is somewhat less developed in mass market situations. They suffer in fact from serious drawbacks preventing them to be massively adopted. We believe however that the attention toward supplementary services may significantly increase due to the exceptional concomitance of two main trends. The first one concerns the current interest boasted by the introduction of next generation networks, such as 4G/IMS through the MMTEL specification efforts. The second trend is determined by the unprecedented levels reached by the mass market penetration of smart phones putting within reach of majority, the enhanced capabilities of these powerful terminals, able to completely renew the end user experience. We claim that context awareness could be the right catalyst allowing a fruitful combination of these two long-term directions of the telecommunication domain. To work towards this goal, we introduce in this paper a methodology allowing the systematic and comprehensive introduction of context-awareness in conversational services. Our methodology involves four main building blocks, we illustrate through various examples drawn from supplementary services. A taxonomy of conversational services is defined and applied to supplementary services. Pending issues complete the analysis of the methodology.