Introduction

22.1413GPPPresence serviceStage 1TS

This specification defines the requirements for the support of the presence service. The presence service results in presence information of a user and information on a user’s devices, services and services components being managed by the network. Together, user, these devices, services and services components are termed presentity (presence entity). This TS makes extensive use of internet terminology to ensure alignment with the presence service description and behaviour in internet recommendations.

The presence service provides access to presence information to be made available to other users or services. Exploitation of this service, see figure 1, will enable the creation of enhanced rich multimedia services along the lines of those currently present in the internet world.

Presence is an attribute related to, but quite different from mobility information, and is a service that can be exploited to create additional services. The types of services that could be supported by the presence service may include:

– New communications services

The presence service will enable new multimedia services to exploit this key enabler to support other advanced multimedia services and communications. These new services may infer the context, availability and willingness of a user to accept or participate in particular types of communications by accessing the presence information for the user’s devices and services. Examples of such new multimedia services that could potentially exploit the presence service include "chat", instant messaging, multimedia messaging, e-mail, , handling of individual media in a multimedia session etc.

– Information services

The presence service may also be exploited to enable the creation of services in which abstract entities are providing the services to the mobile community. The presence service may be used to support such abstract services as cinema ticket information, the score at a football match, motorway traffic status, advanced push services etc.

– Enhanced existing services

Existing services may also be significantly enhanced by exploiting the presence information. For example a user may dynamically arrange for his wireless services to be supported through his corporate PABX whilst he is on-site, require media to be converted and directed to specific devices (e.g. user cannot accept a voice call whilst in a meeting, but is prepared to receive the voice call converted to text in the form of an SMS/MMS/e-mail message). The presence service may also be used to enable the creation of advanced versions of CS/PS services, enable terminal capabilities support etc.

The following figure 1 represents a logical overview of how services could exploit the presence service to create advanced services.

Figure 1: Logical presence service support of services

A presence-enabled service as observed by the user is a service in which the user can control the dissemination of his presence information to other users and services, and also be able to explicitly identify specifically which other users and services to which he provides presence status. Combined with the capability of other users’ control of their own presence status, virtually infinite combinations of users and services interacting at different levels can be created.

The exploitation of the presence service is already available in the internet world, although unfortunately with different non interoperable mechanisms. This specification identifies the requirements for support of an enhanced version of the presence service through the support of attributes (e.g. services, media components of a multimedia service, location information) in an interoperable manner within both wireless and fixed networks, and with external networks.