Interactive Video Applications in 3G-EEWORLD

Collect

Application Introduction
Mobile phones are no longer just a tool for making calls. Today's technologically savvy consumers use mobile phones as both a communication tool and a personal entertainment center. Mobile operators use the latest voice and video interactive technologies to provide mobile users with a variety of application services such as TV programs, video clips, real-time video conversations, video mail, games, etc.
Market Opportunity
3G networks can support the rapid transmission of high-quality service content, which is an important factor in the success of interactive mobile video applications. Currently, there are a total of about 37.5 million WCDMA 3G mobile phones in the world, and most of them are equipped with sophisticated video transmission functions. In Japan, NTT DoCoMo has developed 15 million WCDMA mobile phone users. 1
Where 3G networks are available, video applications as "killer" applications are the main driving force for consumers to switch to 3G technology. In regions such as Europe and Asia, where mobile phone users are already very popular, the transformation of mobile phones into entertainment devices will be a very natural development process. It won't take too long for these consumers to stop using their mobile phones to make calls and check emails. They will play graphic video games or watch the latest music videos while riding the subway and find a lot of fun in them. According to forecasts from IDC, the operating income of the mobile video and mobile TV application market in Western European countries will be close to 2 billion US dollars in 2009. 2
New and exciting content itself is another important factor for the success of mobile video applications. Service content is constantly being enriched, and media producers such as film companies are constantly joining the content production field. The launch of operator portal sites can help consumers quickly find content that interests them. All these factors have promoted the continuous development of interactive video application services. The
types of application services that can be delivered through mobile video are unlimited. Existing interactive entertainment applications support users to use simple and easy-to-use mobile phone key commands to search and browse content services. Consumers can use the same user interface to operate interactive video games, such as Paris street racing games and airplane driving games. Various application systems support seamless integration with each other, and a portal application that can provide comprehensive mobile entertainment and information services can be built.
Technical requirements
To make interactive entertainment services such as video games and video clips controllable and operable on mobile devices, a technical standard is needed that provides built-in support for control messages and low-latency video playback. The 3GPP (The Third Generation Partnership Project) organization has defined the 3G-324M protocol standard to achieve the above support. The standard uses multiplexed switching circuit technology to provide low-latency transmission of video, audio and control messages.
In order to support mobile users to connect to enhanced service applications, we need to use multiple technologies in conjunction. Real-time video telecommunication applications run on UMTS 3G networks, which use the 3G-324M protocol standard, while most enhanced application services use the SIP protocol standard. In this way, in order to solve the matching of the two different types of networks, we need a 3G-324M to SIP video gateway equipped with the best codec function to achieve protocol and media format conversion.
Most 3G-324M video phones use the QCIF format (Quarter Common Intermediate Format) to transmit video streams. Enhanced service applications generally use CIF (Common Intermediate Format), a larger screen size, to transmit content, which is not suitable for smaller mobile phone screens. In interactive video application systems, video streams are generally dynamically resized to help mobile phone users avoid receiving too much video data.

Figure 1: Principle of interactive video solution
Another challenge faced by the video gateway is that we need to convert the DTMF input signals sent by the mobile phone to control the interactive application services into UII format (User Input Indications). These converted messages need to be correctly inserted into the SIP data stream and transmitted to the specified interactive video application system. The accurate conversion and insertion of mobile user input messages by the gateway will directly affect the user's service experience level.
Assuming that most new mobile video services use the SIP standard and multiple application systems run on different servers, we need to create a portal for users, which can instruct the mobile video gateway to seamlessly transfer the current call between multiple application services without interrupting the call or requiring the user to take additional actions.
Vision Solution
NMS Vision video gateway products are specially designed to provide high-performance, carrier-grade 3G-324M video gateway functions to meet the needs of mobile operators and interactive voice and video response systems.
Guaranteed interoperability
• 3G-324M and SIP network interconnection
• Telecom address to SIP network address mapping
• Configurable ISDN and SS7 telecom interfaces
• Configurable SIP/RTP/IP interfaces
• Dynamic conversion and insertion of control messages - UII to RFC 2833 message conversion
Advanced functions
• Provide SIP referral and re-invite functions to support portal applications.
• Provide user-programmable message system for call status
• Built-in support for NMS Vision video codec, which provides economical centralized code conversion processing as an independent system resource Function.
Seamless scalability
• Field upgrade through software loading to support higher processing density.
High reliability
• Highly reliable system operation, support N+1 system fault-tolerant configuration
• Built-in support for common series OAM interface sets