4.1 Informative description of group management

22.2503GPPIP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) Group ManagementRelease 17Stage 1TS

This clause has an informative description of the IMS group management and its role in a few service examples. Furthermore, example characteristics of the group will be described to give an overview of a group and its management.

Group as a concept means a group of persons in this context. Groups can be used by group related services such as conference calls, presence service (c.f. 3GPP TS 22.141 [2]) and messaging (c.f. 3GPP TS 22.340 [3]). This description does not cover requirements for group services themselves but only management of the groups that can be utilized by the group related services. The driver for specifying generic group management is twofold: the same group created by user (or service provider) can be used in many services and same group management functions can be utilised independently of the service being used.

In conference call, the control machinery in network would use a group to setup a conference call and distribution of group media. In messaging area, group management could be utilized in chat sessions (Figure 1) and distribution lists (Figure 2). A chat session could be created by joining a group. The message distribution would be handled by the messaging server. The user would send messages to a group and the server would distribute the messages. In the context of presence service, the user could create groups of watchers with the group management features and different presence information would be provided to each of the groups. These are only few examples of possible use of IMS group management and they intend to clarify the scope of group management.

Figure 1. Example: groups in context of chat service

Figure 2. Example: group used as a message delivery list

How the group is used within a service is outside the scope of this document and outside the scope of group management. For example, taking part in a chat session, making a conference call and give access to certain attributes of the presence information are all group service specific issues and therefore outside the scope of group management. However, all of them could use groups managed by generic IMS group management.

The IMS group management is a common set of actions that can be taken by the group administrator of a group or the group members. Typically, the group consists of members who may have varying rights for configuring or seeing the group properties.