MULTIMEDIA MESSAGING SERVICE

Abstract

Short Messaging Service (SMS) has brought about a revolution in mobile telephony, and has gone a long way in popularizing cellular phones. The use of SMS is not restricted to passing a message from one celiphone .to another. The users of the service have been using there creativity to frame new phrases, coin new acronyms, and come up with new emoticons. In fact SMS is often called `the new language' of today's generation. But SMS, being a text-only service does restrict the users creativity. Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), on the other hand, would allow the user to compose messages with rich content. Users can include text, images, audio. and video clips .into there messages. The freedom of expression and creativity that this service offers is• expected to bring about another revolution in the world of mobile messaging. In fact it is said that this revolution would have a similar impact on the cellphone industry as the transition from DOS to Windows had on the PC industry. This document starts with explaining the technical details of Multimedia Messaging Service and later on describes a prototype of the service developed during the dissertation. The prototype implements a subset of the functionalities specified by the WA? forum. The idea was to develop a basic working model of MMS without making the design too complex. The prototype consists of the two essential components of the MMS System -an MMS Client and an MMS Proxy Relay. The prototype was developed on a Sun Ultra-250 machine running Sun Solaris Operating System. The development and debugging tool used was Suit Workshop. Exceed from Hummingbird Communications was used as the X-Server to , display and use Sun machine's Graphical Desktop on the local Windows 2000 based PC. In the final phases of development, Purify from Rational Software was used to find and remove memory leaks from the system.