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IP Media Servers and IMS in Voice Mail and Unified Messaging
This white paper examines the various messaging services, industry trends in messaging, and the role of media servers/MRFPs in messaging including voicemail and unified messaging.
Voicemail, the decades-old service that we all love and hate, is transitioning to UM (Unified Messaging), which lets consumers and business users access all messages – including voicemail, videomail, email and fax – from any device, including black phones, PCs, cell phones and smartphones. UM lets service providers meet a growing customer expectation – access to any service from any device on any network – and leverage trends such as mobility, convergence and triple and quadruple plays. That high level of convenience is a key reason why service providers increasingly offer UM for the consumer and enterprise markets. In a 2006 Infonetics Research study, 46% of service providers surveyed in Asia Pacific, Europe and North America said that they offer UM, while 71% said that they plan to offer it by April 2007.
Historically, voicemail services have been implemented on circuit-based “service nodes” which typically integrate application logic, mail storage, and media processing capabilities (such as IVR processing) into a monolithic, expensive, and proprietary solution with limited flexibility. Early Unified Messaging solutions required a complex integration of IP packet networks for email messaging, with circuit-based networks for voicemail and fax.
There is now broad industry consensus that IP-based communications networks should be based on the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) architecture (see "IMS for Dummies" (2007) & "Future Ready Platforms for IMS").
IMS is designed to support any access network technology using a common, IP-based services infrastructure to drive service convergence across both wireless and wireline networks, accessed by both traditional circuit-based phones and next generation IP access devices.
In IMS, service logic and media processing are decomposed into separate and distinct architecture elements. The service logic executing on application servers is functionally distinct from media processing, which is delivered by the media servers, also known as the MRFP (Multimedia Resource Function Processor).
The media server/MRFP implements its capabilities as generic, service-agnostic media processing building blocks that can be shared and reused across dozens of telecommunication services. For example, a videomail application would use the building blocks for recording video files (i.e. a video message), playing back video files, and collecting DTMF digits, while different combinations of building blocks can be shared and reused by many other services including multimedia conferencing, video IVR, ringback tones, or prepaid calling card applications. This reuse and sharing drives improved resource utilization and economics. An additional benefit of MRFP reuse is that adding a new service is isolated to updates to the IMS application servers, which accelerates new service introduction and revenues, while reducing integration effort, complexity, and cost.
RadiSys Convedia Media Servers deliver an optimized MRFP for IMS-based unified messaging solutions. Convedia media servers support extensive audio and video media processing features, along with broad support for open standards-based control protocols including SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and VoiceXML, making RadiSys an ideal partner for UM solution developers requiring a real-time IP media processing adjunct for their unified messaging solution offerings and deployments.