Mobile Messaging Technologies and Services: SMS, EMS and MMS, 2nd Edition

4

Enhanced Messaging Service

Without any doubt, the Short Message Service has been a tremendous commercial success. However, SMS traffic growth started to slow down. In 2000, to prevent this slowdown, several mobile manufacturers, mobile operators, and third party vendors decided to give a further breath to SMS by collaborating on the development of an application-level extension of SMS: the Enhanced Messaging Service (EMS). EMS supersedes SMS capabilities by allowing the exchange of rich-media messages containing text with pictures, melodies, animations, etc. Standardization work went on for almost 2 years to define and finalize EMS features. A close analysis of the standardization work and availability of EMS handsets in the market leads to the identification of two sets of EMS features. The first set of features is defined in 3GPP technical specifications Release 99 (with several updates in Release 4 and Release 5) whereas the second set of features is defined in 3GPP technical specifications Release 5. In this book, the first features set is described as basic EMS and the second features set is described as extended EMS. This chapter provides an in-depth description of the two sets of EMS features.

4.1 Service Description

4.1.1 Basic EMS

Basic EMS allows the exchange of rich-media messages. Note that basic EMS features were mainly introduced in [3GPP-23.040] Release 99, with several updates in Release 4 and Release 5. EMS messages can contain several of the following elements: ...