Enabling IMS with Multicast and Broadcast Capabilities

The evolution of third generation cellular network focuses on the provision of enriched multimedia services and the support of QoS (quality of service) guarantees. The IMS (IP multimedia subsystem) is specified as subsystem providing resource, admission and charging control. Enabling GPRS (general packet radio service) and UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications system) to support multicast and broadcast transmissions, 3GPP (third generation partnership project) has recently standardised the MBMS (multimedia broadcast multicast services) framework. Up to now, IMS and MBMS are separated subsystems sharing no common interfaces in order to utilise each other. However, 3GPP is working currently on release 7 to integrate IMS and MBMS. In this paper we present an efficient integration of IMS and MBMS which supports several phases of unicast, multicast and broadcast transmissions. Furthermore, an integrated solution framework is introduced. Several end-to-end signalling procedures are finally discussed.