IMS-MBMS Convergence for Next Generation Mobile Networks

Mobile and wireless communication standards and technologies have witnessed rapid enhancements in the last few years. Dynamic, interactive, rich content and location based services such as IPTV, multimedia conferencing, buddy lists and presence have emerged. However, multimedia services often prove to be heavy on radio resources and multicast or broadcast is a resource efficient transmission mode. Currently, IMS only supports unicast transmission, so 3GPP MBMS is selected as the broadcast/multicast delivery technology. In this paper, we propose a converged IMS and MBMS architecture, designed to support the next generation of multimedia multicast services. A comprehensive network entity design is also elaborated. This work is carried out as part of EU-IST project C-MOBILE (IST-2005-27423).