Mobile contextual mashup service for IMS

Abstract

The Web 2.0 paradigm is all about the development of applications and content at the edge of the network by anyone. This ldquowisdom of the crowdrdquo type of activity resulted in a large number of applications being introduced in short time frames utilizing the telecom network as a ldquodumb piperdquo. However, IMS may open up the business opportunities for the cellular operators where they can take advantage of the openness of APIs offered by Web 2.0 dot-coms and still offer the flexible call control features of IMS. Thus, convergence of Web 2.0, mashups and IMS call control features have suddenly become a viable business model that will benefit the end users, cellular operators and application service providers at the same time. Rapid deployment of IMS can certainly be enhanced by successful blending of mashups and built-in features of IMS such as security, authentication, and quality of service. However, there is a lack of existing use case scenarios and experimental validation of supporting various web 2.0 applications over IMS. In this paper, we provide such a framework that helps to blend these two and highlight the lessons learned from the prototyping effort. We believe this framework and analysis of the results obtained from this experiment will be illuminating to cellular operators who plan to deploy IMS infrastructure and offer mash-up type services as well. A new type of service called ldquocontextualrdquo mashup is also described.