Services and technical considerations for the wireless IP multimedia subsystem

Merging voice over IP (VoIP), multimedia, and third-generation (3G) wireless telephony presents significant opportunities and challenges. The challenges are both commercial and technical. In order for the carriers to deploy the service, wireless multimedia services must be marketable to the end users in initial deployments when user equipment and service is not yet widespread and yet provide enhanced services to users with next-generation terminals. From the technical perspective, wireless systems must provide efficient support for multiple simultaneous data streams with divergent characteristics to support multimedia services. We take example services and step through the wireless IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) showing how these services can meet the commercial needs and the technical challenges the market and users require.