MMS - the modern wireless solution for multimedia messaging

MMS provides multimedia messaging solution to contemporary and evolving wireless communications. Both SMS and Email have been widely used for messaging in wireless and fixed networks respectively, but none of these is capable enough to fulfill the present and the future demands of wireless messaging. None of the existing messaging systems can also take full advantages of the recent technological advancements in wireless communications. MMS has been designed both in 3GPP and WAP Forum to overcome the known limitations and shortcomings of the existing messaging systems. MMS utilizes the capabilities provided by WAP, GPRS and 3G, which offer efficient use of radio resources and improved connectivity. This paper makes an analysis over MMS by pointing out its features and functionalities. Architecture, message structure, encoding, information flow and transport of MMS come gradually under scrutiny in this paper both from standardization and implementation point of views to find feasibility of MMS in the target wireless infrastructure. According to the comparative study made in this paper, MMS is not only equipped with the positive features of existing messaging systems, but also with some new ones. A predictive study is also made in this paper to outline different expected MMS-based services.