It Takes a Wireless Village

By
iApplianceWeb
(04/27/01, 07:39:33 AM EDT)

It takes a village. A wireless village, that is. Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia have established Wireless Village, the mobile Instant Messaging and Presence Services(IMPS) initiative to define and promote a set of universal specifications for mobile instant messaging and presence services. The Wireless Village initiative is open to participation from industry supporters interested in providing early commentary on these specifications and building interoperable implementations for them.

The specifications will be used for exchanging messages and presence information among mobile devices, mobile services, and Internet-based instant messaging services with a protocol optimized for mobile devices and wireless networks.

User participation in the use of chat and other instant messaging services with mobile devices (phones, pagers, PDAs) is currently limited by the lack of a common and interoperable standard for the mobile world. Establishing a mobile paradigm requires addressing many different requirements, such as the variety of mobile devices being used.

The goal of the Wireless Village initiative is to deliver architectural, protocol, and test specifications and tools for mobile IMPS. The initiative will also define procedures and tools for testing conformance and interoperability of mobile instant messaging and presence services.

The instant messaging specification will be based on prevalent bearer protocols and other standards such as SMS (Short Messaging Services), MMS (Multimedia Messaging Services), WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), and XML (Extensible Markup Language). This service will include security capabilities for user authentication, secure message transfer, and access control. Operators will find these specifications applicable to both existing 2G, new 2.5G (i.e., GPRS), as well as emerging 3G wireless network technologies.

The Wireless Village initiative intends to publish the specifications by the end of the year. In addition, the initiative plans to sponsor interoperability demonstrations of mobile devices and wireless services that support the specifications. Other industry leaders can become supporters of the Wireless Village initiative; information is available at the group's Web site, www.wireless-village.org.