The Mobile Application Server (MAS): An Infrastructure Platform for Mobile Wireless Services

There has been a surge of interest in developing advanced mobile voice and data services. One of the biggest challenges faced by service providers is to create new services efficiently and rapidly. We describe the motivation, architecture and design of the Mobile Application Server (MAS), a Java middleware prototype platform for mobile services which provides basic common building blocks required by mobile wireless applications, such as user profile management, location handling, device detection, content adaptation and e-wallet functions. The MAS is modular, flexible, and provides an open API for 3rd party service creation. Users can thus utilize a variety of access technologies (CDPD, cellular, 802.11, SMS, etc.) and delivery mechanisms (HTML, WML, VoiceXML, etc.) while application developers are spared the details of this heterogeneity. The MAS also interfaces to traditional telecommunications system (A/IN) elements such as SCPs as well as Next Generation Network (NGN) or converged-network elements such as Call Agents. We present application examples of the use of MAS, initial performance measurements and discuss some lessons learned from this experimental system. We conclude with directions for further work.