KR100735908B1 - A communication system - Google Patents

Abstract

The present invention relates to a communication system comprising at least one user associated with presence information, wherein the presence information comprises a plurality of parts, at least one of the parts Includes information identifying the application to which the part corresponds; And at least one entity for presence information associated with at least one user is provided, the at least one entities having at least one entity application, wherein the at least one entity is the at least one entity application The information is used to obtain the one part corresponding to.

Description

Communication system {A COMMUNICATION SYSTEM}

The present invention relates to a communication system and, more particularly, to the provision of a presence service in a communication system.

Today, a wide range of communication systems enable communication between two or more entities, such as between user equipment and / or other nodes associated with the system.

Communication systems are known that provide wireless communication to a user terminal or other node. One example of a wireless system is a public land mobile network (PLMN). PLMNs are generally cellular networks, where a base transceiver station (BTS) or similar access entity (BTS) service is used for user equipment (UE), such as mobile stations (MS), over an air interface. Works. The operation of the equipment required for the communication is generally controlled by one or more control entities that can interconnect themselves. One or more gateway nodes support connecting the PLMN to another network. Examples of other networks are packet switched data networks such as other cellular networks, public switched telephone networks (PSTNs) and Internet Protocol (IP) based networks. Communication between the user equipment and other components of the communication system follows the appropriate communication protocol, which defines the rules that allow communication to be handled within the system.

In current third generation (3G) wireless systems, various servers are defined for the processing of other communication services for mobile users. These include servers that provide call state control functions known as CSCF. In addition, control functions may be provided by entities such as home subscriber servers (HSSs) and applications by various application servers. In general, the HSS is for permanently storing the user's profile and is used during authentication. For example, in the 3G release 5 architecture described by 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project), these entities may be known to be in the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS).

The IMS network is located at the hub of the 3G architecture and supports IP-based networks that handle both conventional voice telephony and multimedia services. The 3GPP has adopted Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as a core session signaling protocol for 3G networks. SIP was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Interested persons may refer to the 3GPP specification 24.299, which describes the basic operation of the IMS network, at http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/Latest-drafts/24229-201.zip, "IP Multimedia Call Control Protocol based on SIP. and SIP prospects entitled "SDP". SIP is a request / response style protocol from the perspective of all messages sent from the source, where there is a corresponding response from the destination confirming receipt of the outgoing message. (The acknowledgment ACK message is a special case where no response is sent.)

For example, in a 3G network, the first moment a user turns on his mobile terminal, he must register his user ID or address of the network before the terminal is fully connected. This is done by sending a SIP 'register' message to the IMS at the terminal, which includes the details of the user address. The IMS receives and processes this information using a serving call state control function (S-CSCF). This is hereinafter referred to as "registration". The registration message is used only to provide a mapping between the user's alias and the access address, for example, mapping the alias sip: mikko.lonnfors@sonera.com to the terminal IP address. The IMS approves the registration by sending an appropriate acknowledgment message (eg, 200 OK message) in accordance with SIP. In addition, the next registration (re-registration) occurs each time the previous registration expires, is being expired, or when there is a change in the user's state. When a user wants to establish a session with another user, such as a voice call or messaging session (an alternative method of sending a message, i.e. sending it with a SIP message, where no session setup is required). In this case, session negotiation will be performed under SIP as well.

An application server (AS) can provide services such as instant messaging, presence, local traffic reporting, and conferencing through IMS. An AS may be present in or outside the IMS network. In general, when a supported service is provided by a third party, the AS is external.
One particular example of status information is presence information. For example, a user or application server subscribed to the presence service may determine the performance and availability of another user to accept a request for other presence features / properties (depending on the equipment and service provider). However, in systems that support SIP, presence may display various indications such as' available for all requests at office ', only available for personal requests at home' and 'on call' (or at least that way). I can guess. Thus, presence information allows a user to verify availability of another user before attempting a call. The presence service may provide other than information, such as available / not available. For example, it may include visual, live, or phonetic elements, and may describe various issues related to game sessions.

Presence services being standardized at OMA 8 (Open Mobile Alliance (www.openmobilealliance.org)), 3GPP, and the IETF are becoming more focused. Many presence aware applications will grow further in the future. As the number of applications increases, the information in the presence will also increase. The increase in information expected from the receiving terminal is subject to the same challenges as how to process the presence information, i.e. which applications the parts of the presence information relate to. The terminal can run one or more applications. For example, the terminal can run a dynamic phone book application and a game application.

In current IETF and 3GPP modules, a tuple structure is used. A tuple has a 'random' TUPLE ID that does not contain any semantic, ie it cannot be used to describe the purpose of the tuple. Each tuple can have multiple attributes. Moreover, different tuples may have attributes of the same name but intended to be used / decrypted differently depending on the sending / receiving application. For example, the presence information may include two tuples, one for the game and one for the dynamic phone book (DPB), and each of these tuples may contain a status field. It may include. Dynamic Phone Book (DPB) may be designed to recognize status values of Available, Discreet, and Unavailable, while the game is designed to recognize status values: Shooting, Death, Stop, Lost. It may have been. As can be seen from this example, if the status field has the correct meaning, the status field must be sent to the correct application. However, this is a problem if the terminal has more than one application. The receiving terminal has only one application, which is also a problem when the transmitting terminal or the presentity has a plurality of applications. If the data presented in the above example is sent to a terminal having only a DPB, the receiving terminal should be able to determine which tuples are intended for the DPB application.

Currently, there is no mechanism for passing the information to the correct application other than checking the respective tuples for each application and seeing what their status values mean for the application. In other words, a trial and error method is adopted. However, these methods create uncertainty about the accuracy of the information. In some cases, even if the value is the same for an attribute, it is incorrectly identified by the wrong application. An example of this is as follows. The sending terminal has a DPB and an instant messaging (IM) application, and it sets the status values: DPB = Closed and IM = Open. Note that in this example, all of the applications use only the status values Open and Closed. Now, assume that the receiving terminal has only an IM application but receives the DPB and IM states. If the receiving terminal attempts a state value of the DPB, which is the first state value, the receiving terminal understands the first state value of the DPB and provides it to the user through an IM application, in the terminal of the presentation. The user's IM application is open, but notified that it is closed.

When a user wants to obtain the presence information of different users, it has been proposed that the user can include a filter to reduce the data from the presence server, that is, the presence information. Such filters may reduce data from the presence server to include only parts of the user of interest. The tuple identifiers are used as filtering criteria by watchers (users requesting presence information), and the manner in which rights are based on tuple identification has many disadvantages. For example, if the user being watched has four tuples (T1, T2, T3, T4), and one watcher is only interested in tuples T2 and T3, the watcher is only tuples T2 and T3. You can set the filter to notify the user. The watched user will then decide to start displaying different values for various reasons for the particular watcher considering all tuples. Thus, the watched user will create new tuples T5, T6, T7, and T8 and a new access list so that the watcher sees tuples T5-T8, not tuples T1-T4. However, since the observer has set up filtering based on the tuple identifier, no tuples are provided to him. This is a disadvantage.

Another disadvantage of using tuple identifiers in filtering is that the presentity is generally not allowed for a particular observer to be as detailed as other observers, or that information provided to another separate group is different from information provided to other observers. Does not want to be known to the observer that it is slightly or completely different.

If the filtering setting is changed every hour, other details of the information provided to the observer change, so that the authority information of the observer also changes. This may be the case when the filtering is based on a unique tuple identifier.

An embodiment of the present invention is to overcome one or more of the above problems.

According to an aspect of the present invention, there is provided a communication system comprising at least one user associated with presence information, the presence information comprising a plurality of parts, at least one of the parts being at least one part. It contains information identifying the application to deal with.

According to a second aspect of the present invention, there is provided a communication method comprising providing presence information for an associated user, wherein the presence information comprises a plurality of parts, at least one of the parts Includes information identifying an application that deals with at least one part; And at least one entity obtains at least one of the parts, the at least one entity has at least one entity application, and the at least one entity includes information for identifying the at least one entity application. Includes parts that do

According to a third aspect of the invention, a user is provided in a communication system, wherein the user has associated presence information, the presence information includes a plurality of parts, the user dealing with the at least one part. It is possible to provide at least one of the parts with information identifying the application to the.

According to a fourth aspect of the invention, an entity is provided in a communication system, wherein the entity comprises at least one application that obtains a method for obtaining at least one part of presence information associated with a user, wherein the at least one The parts of the include information identifying the application, and the obtaining method is arranged to obtain the at least part containing information identifying the at least one application.

The fairly static filtering settings possible in an embodiment of the present invention are particularly useful when the filter is stored at a particular server (eg, in a presence list case) or as such.

Embodiments of the present invention may allow other watchers to conceal from the watcher the fact that there are different levels of information available (or completely different information).

Embodiments of the present invention allow for changing the rights without affecting some other functionality where the rights may be separated, for example by providing filtering settings or more semantics to the presence information component.

Embodiments of the present invention may offer the observer the possibility of requesting semantic unrecognized information instead of making a request for “significant” identification information.

In order to better understand the present invention and to effectively convey the same content, reference will be made to the following exemplary embodiments with reference to the drawings.

1 illustrates a communication system to which the present invention may be applied.

2 schematically illustrates an embodiment of the present invention.

3 illustrates the embodiment of FIG. 2 in more detail.

4 illustrates the IMS part for the system of FIG. 1 in more detail.

5 schematically illustrates an embodiment of the present invention.

Referring first to FIG. 1, a typical third ^rd generation wireless communication system operating under a UMTS (Univsersal Mobile Telecommunications System) is illustrated. At the hub of this system is an IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) 100 network, which calls between two or more users of the network (or between a user and a network component (eg, an application server)). And routes all kinds of sessions. For example, a mobile terminal 111, a laptop 112, a personal desktop assistant (PDA) 113, a public switched telephone network (PSTN) telephone 131, a computer terminal 123, an application server 121, And an application server 122. The IMS uses an IP-based network to handle these calls, which may include voice calls and multimedia calls.

The IMS network operates efficiently as a gateway in a 3G system between the users 111, 123, 113 and other networks, such as PSTN 130 and external IP based network 120. Signaling between the mobile terminal and other users of the IMS network and signaling within the IMS network range is performed under the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Unless specifically mentioned below, all references to messages are SIP messages and are capitalized. Although the preferred embodiment of the present invention is described in the context of SIP, it should be appreciated that other embodiments of the present invention may be performed in other environments than the SIP environment.

2 and 3, an embodiment of the present invention is shown schematically. 2 shows a transmitting terminal 10 and a receiving terminal 12. The transmitting terminal 10 provides the presence information to the receiving terminal 12. In addition, a presence server is provided. The presence server 14 and the transmitting terminal are sometimes referred to as a presentation. The presence server 14 provides the presence information necessary for the receiving terminal 12. The presence server will receive the presence information from the transmitting terminal 10. The connection between the transmitting terminal 10 and the presence server 14 and the connection between the presence server 14 and the receiving terminal may be through a network component or an entity not shown in the figure.

In an embodiment of the invention, the receiving terminal 12 (which may be any user as described above, and may be referred to as a watcher) and possibly the presence server 14 identify other parts of presence information. Thus, in order to be able to send parts of the presence information to the correct application, the transmitting terminal 10 (which may be any user as described above, may also be referred to as the watched (or presenting) user) may present You will need to record the staples. In particular in embodiments of the invention, a semanticly meaningful application identification information field is provided for each tuple, or for at least some tuples. This field may be referred to as an application ID field. The information may be identity itself or may be information related to identity. The transmitting application inserts an application-specific identifier into the application identification information field, which can be recognized at the receiving end. The receiving terminal sends the tuples to an application in the receiving terminal identified in the application ID field.

This will be described in more detail with reference to FIG. 3. In step 1, the applications 16a, 16b, 16c in the transmitting terminal register their application identification with the presence engine 18 in the terminal. Following this step, the application initiates an information notification, which transmits the information to the presence server (and from the server to the receiving terminal if the observer has made a subscription). In the example of FIG. 3, the terminal appears to have three applications. As in this example, and the terminal or other users may include more or less than three applications.

In step 2, each application 16 announces the presence information in the form of one or more tuples, and the presence engine attaches an application ID to each tuple. The presence engine 18 then sends the information to the presence server 14. In alternative embodiments, the application may directly attach the application ID.

In step 3, the presence engine 20 of the receiving terminal 12 may receive a NOTIFY message of new presence information from the presence server 14. According to the application ID (which is passed to each tuple), the tuples are routed by the presence engine to the corresponding application of the receiving terminal. Alternatively, each application can receive all tuples, but ignore any tuples with erratic application identification.

Thus, every application will have its own application ID. For example, game 1, game 2, SMS, IM-1, IM-2, and e-mail. If two terminals 1 and 2 have the same application, eg IM-1, the application ID is the same for the application. However, if terminal 3 has an application identified by IM-2 (eg, produced by another vendor), then the application has an application ID that is different from the IM-1 application in terminals 1 and 2. Will have In such cases, the provided attributes may be used by other applications as well, but care must be taken because the attributes or their values may not be recognized correctly. One example of this is when there are two different clients for an IM. Since the basic functionality can be the same, a state attribute can therefore be valid even if the application interprets the remaining attributes appropriately or completely improperly.

Since the tuples include the application identification, it may provide efficient (application specific) filtering capabilities and also find the correct application that matches the tuple.

The tuples have a general structure as shown in draft-impp-cpim-pidf-05.txt, which is http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-impp-cpim-pidf-05. It is linked to txt. The application can then extend the "include additional information" option by defining a new XML namespace. XML stands for Extensible Markup Language (this is a World Wide Web-a markup language based on SGML, and is designed to overcome the limitations of HTML. Make sure that pages contain definitions and execution plans for components and their context. One).

It can be changed by someone or whatever it is defined so that different tuples can be used with different applications. This may depend on the type of application. Some or all tuples may be defined to have a standard format (standard attributes can be defined, for example, in the 3GPP standard). Alternatively or additionally, application developers may define their own tuples.

In general, there is no limit to the number of tuples and the number of attributes in tuples that one presentity may have.

Entities that place the application ID in each tuple may be a presence engine or application that announces the information. In some embodiments of the invention, the uniqueness of the application ID requires its registration. The uniqueness of the application ID may be the case within other applications and other collections of information requiring semantic meaning.

The application ID can be used in multi-value support and filtering. For example, the application ID can be used to hide different "accuracy" levels of information. Specifically, the application information is unique in view of other applications not using the same application ID, but means that the same application ID may appear multiple times in the context of different tuples of the presence server. For example, the tuple ID is unique, but the same application ID may exist in two or three tuples on the presence information of the presentity. The application ID can then be used for filtering. In other words, the presenter (receiving terminal) sets a filter so that the presenter does not receive all available presence information of the user (presentity) being watched. In order to enable the presenter to receive only presence information for a particular application, the filter may be set to filter specific presence information or a combination of the two.

For example, if filtering is set to provide all tuples associated with a "user provided location", the following tuples are provided to the watcher (if present from the presence server to the presence server):

Presentity = ABC

TUPLE 1

tuple-id: xyz3226

 application id = "user provided location"

 user provided location = TAMPERE

TUPLE 2

tuple-id: xyb3293

application id = "user provided location"

user provided location = HOME

TUPLE 3

tuple-id: xya3288

application id = "user provided location"

user provided location = x-coord, y-coord

Referring to FIG. 5, the first presentity 30 provides tuples 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Each tuple contains an application ID, tuples 1 and 2 have an application ID "A", tuples 3 and 4 have an application ID "B", and tuple 5 has an application ID "C". Let watcher 32 need only application "A". Filter 34 then filters the tuples, providing tuples 1 and 2 to the user 32. Indeed it should be appreciated that the filter may be part of a presentity that is part of a server or an independent entity such as part of the observer 32. Thus the application ID is used to filter the tuples.

The tuples may be intended for separate users. Then tuples 1, 3, and 5 may be intended for one observer, and tuple 5 may be for a separate observer. Thus, the observer can only see tuples 1, 3, and 5. Eventually, if the observer only wants tuples for application "A", tuple 1 will be provided to the observer. The filter 34 provides this additional filtering. In some embodiments of the invention, an independent filter is provided, or a direct method is provided to ensure that the watcher can only obtain tuples that correspond to a particular application ID.

In addition, separate observer groups may have individual presence information available for individual groups.

Embodiments of the present invention allow applications to easily recognize from the presence information all information that the particular application can interpret and understand.

In an embodiment of the present invention, it should be appreciated that the application identifier may be used by the presence server when performing a filtering operation. Further, in some embodiments of the present invention, an operator specific application may be provided to the presence server that may use the application IDs. For example, the presence server can modify some attribute values in tuples that it can recognize, and can know which user has been granted access to the presence server.

Embodiments of the invention can be used to make a filter. For example, the observer may only request parts of presence information related to one or more specific applications. The filtering may be performed by the presence being watched—by the user or the presence server, by the watcher, or by any other entity. Whenever presence information is provided to a particular viewer by a particular presentity, the filter information may be stored in advance so that the presence information can be filtered for the required application. The filtering may define whether the application is required, whether the application is not required, or by a combination of these techniques.

As mentioned above, the observer is generally a user as described above. A "presentity" can be considered a user and a presence server associated with the user. The presence server stores presence information for the user associated with the presence server. In fact, it should be appreciated that more than one user is associated with each server. The presence server may be located in an end device (terminal).

The presence information currently defined by 3GPP may include the following information, which will be described below, but the information is not limited to these and requirements from stage 1 (requirements group), and is intended to extend the presence Standards are under way to develop the concept.

Subscriber status; Network status; Communication method; Connection address; Providing subscriber location; Providing network location; May include a priority.

Presence may also include other information such as mood, favorite color, and so on.

It is to be appreciated that the present invention is not limited by attributes called application identification information and may be applied to any attribute provided that the possibility of operating a similar type is provided.

Embodiments of the present invention are not limited to the use of tuples. Although not all systems, tuples can be used to build presence documents, for example a wireless village presence can manipulate presence information at the attribute level, and the application ID is a separate attribute for each. This is true even when connected with.

4 shows a schematic IMS network 100. The IMS includes various components including a plurality of call state control functions (CSCFs). CSCF is the equivalent of a SIP server on the IETF architecture.

Interrogating CSCF (I-CSCF) 201 is a basic IMS node used to end a call in the IMS network and performs functions at the edge of the network. Here, communication with external nodes of the mobile terminal 101, the PDA 113, and the application server (AS) 121 is presented. As can be seen in FIG. 1, the connection between the mobile terminal, the PDA, and the application server to the I-CSCF is not direct, but a mobile core network for the mobile terminal, and the Internet 120 for the application server. Can be connected via a suitable intermediate network such as

HSS 202 is a centralized user database that interfaces both I-CSCF and CSCF 204, and stores information of all users of the IMS. The I-CSCF uses the HSS to perform functions such as retrieving new users and retrieving routing information on the S-CSCF for sending messages from external components to the S-CSCF.

The S-CSCF is an IMS node that is obliged to invoke services related to the IMS user. For example, the S-CSCF also performs a registration function for an IMS user, thereby handling user registration. The presence server function runs like an application server.

It should be appreciated that the description of FIG. 4 is merely a schematic representation, and in fact there are additional elements such as, for example, a proxy-CSCF (P-CSCF) missing something from the sentence. Embodiments of the present invention may be used in other systems than shown in FIG.

A presence package can be used to subscribe to the presence information of any user. The semantics of the presence package may allow any user to send a subscription message to the presence server for presence information, if no such presence package exists, the presence server subscribes to the user. It means that we can't recognize all the events we tried to do. Eventually, the presence package needs to be defined on the presence server, and after being defined, it can receive and recognize a subscription message for an associated event about a change in presence information. The presence server creates a state associated with the presence information, and when any change occurs in the presence information, the presence server will initiate a response or notification.

Although embodiments of the invention have been described in 3G context using SIP, it should be appreciated that other suitable system and interface protocols may be used. In particular, implementation of the present invention may be used in applications that conform to the IETF specification.

Having described the exemplary embodiments of the present invention, there are many variations and modifications that can be made to the disclosed solution without departing from the scope of the invention as defined by the following claims.

Claims (25)

At least one user associated with presence information, wherein the presence information includes a plurality of parts, wherein at least one of the parts includes information identifying an application to which the at least one part corresponds; ; And A communication system comprising at least one entity provided with presence information related to the at least one user, wherein the at least one entity has at least one entity application, and the at least one entity is the at least one entity And use the information to obtain the at least one part corresponding to an application. The method of claim 1, And said at least one entity comprises means for receiving said at least one part of said information. The method of claim 2, And said entity comprises means for transmitting said at least one part of said information to an identified entity application. The method of claim 3, wherein And said transmitting means comprises an application engine. The method of claim 1, And the entity is a user. The method of claim 1, The entity receiving the at least one part of the information in response to a request from the entity. The method of claim 1, Wherein said at least one user comprises at least one application. The method of claim 1, And the at least one user comprises a presence engine. The method of claim 8, The at least one application configured to register the information identifying the application with the presence engine. The method according to claim 8 or 9, At least one of the at least one application and the presence engine is adapted to add the identification information to at least one part. The method of claim 1, And the user comprises user equipment. The method of claim 1, The presence information includes the following information parties: subscriber status; Network status; Communication means; Connection address; Providing subscriber location; Providing network location; text; Priority; Feeling; At least one of the favorite colors. The method of claim 1, And the system operates according to a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The method of claim 1, And said part of said information comprises a tuple. The method of claim 14, And the tuple includes information identifying the user and the application identification information. The method of claim 1, The entity is arranged to request only one or more parts of the presence information to be processed by one or more applications of the entity. The method of claim 16, And a filtering means is provided to provide only the requested part of the presence information. The method of claim 17, And said filtering means is provided to at least one of a server, a presence server, and said at least one user. The method of claim 1, And the at least one entity is adapted to use the information to filter the presence information. The method of claim 1, The entity application is adapted to process at least one part of the presence information comprising information identifying the entity application. Providing presence information to an associated user, wherein the presence information includes a plurality of parts, at least one of the parts including information identifying an application that deals with the at least one part; And At least one entity obtaining at least one of the parts, wherein the at least one entity has at least one entity application, and wherein the at least one entity acquires parts And information identifying at least one entity application. The method of claim 21, The communication method comprises processing in the at least one entity application, wherein at least one part of the presence information comprises information identifying the entity application. In the user equipment of the communication system, The user equipment has associated presence information, wherein the presence information includes a plurality of parts, the user equipment providing information to at least one of the parts identifying an application that targets the at least one part. User equipment of a communication system, characterized in that the. In the entity of a communication system, The entity comprises at least one application acquiring means for acquiring at least one part of the presence information associated with a user, wherein the at least one part comprises information identifying an application, the acquiring the at least one part And said acquiring means comprises information identifying said at least one application. The method of claim 24, The application identified in the at least one part, And to process at least one part of the presence information comprising information identifying the application.

Images