PAPER AN ADAPTIVE AND COST-EFFECTIVE DATA TRANSMISSION FRAMEWORK USING MMS TECHNOLOGY FOR CLIENT-SERVER APPLICATION An Adaptive and Cost-Effective Data Transmission Framework Using MMS Technology for Client-Server Application http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v6i1.1760 A. Setyono1, M. J. Alam2 and C. Eswaran3 1, 2, 3 Multimedia University, Cyberjaya, Malaysia 1 Dian Nuswantoro University, Semarang, Indonesia Abstract—Limitation of message size of the MMS the proposed techniques (iii) to design an adaptive and technology is one of the important factors which make this cost-effective client-server application and (iv) to imple- technology less attractive. This limitation restricts the ment the techniques for developing client-server applica- system developers in developing new mobile applications tion. The developed system will be used to implement the using MMS technology. This research attempts to improve client-server application, with MMS application on the the capacity of the maximum message size by implementing client side and Internet applications on the server side. compression, splitting and cropping techniques for MMS Internet applications on the server side can be accessed by application on the mobile phone devices. This paper user with MMS application in mobile environment. This presents the architecture to enhance the multimedia research is expected to provide a valuable contribution to capabilities of the MMS technology and also the the readers and researchers for developing mobile system implementation details for developing client-server system applications using MMS technology. The following are applications. The modified MMS technology can be used to the important contributions of this paper: (i) it describes develop practical client-server applications. about the mobile messaging system (ii) it develops trans- mission method for large multimedia file size (iii) it pre- Index Terms—Multimedia message, Message size, MMS, sents the design of an adaptive and cost-effective for cli- client-server application ent-server applications and (iv) it also implements and discusses about an adaptive and cost-effective transmis- I. INTRODUCTION sion method for mobile system application. Multimedia messaging service (MMS) provides the The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 user a complete knowledge about multimedia and has the discusses data transmission method. The proposed design potential to significantly increase the mobile communica- of client-server application and discussion is presented in tion usage [1]. MMS is considered as the best and proven Section 3. Implementation and simulation are presented in messaging technology and it has surpassed email and Section 4. Section 5 discusses the evaluation and analysis SMS [2]. MMS experienced dramatic growth as for ex- and finally conclusion and future work are given in Sec- ample in the USA, more than 10.3 billion MMS messages tion 6. were sent in the first half of 2009 and experienced a growth of 4.7 billion from the same period of the previous II. DATA TRANSMISSION TECHNIQUES year [3]. The initial standard for MMS size was up to a MMS technology is the developed version of the SMS maximum of 30 KB. The standard was raised to 100 KB technology [2]. SMS has experienced tremendous success and the 3G standard is 300 KB [3], [4]. Currently, MMS that cannot be exceeded by MMS [4]. In the early stages, supports an average message size of 600 KB with maxi- many people expected that the MMS could replace SMS, mum message size limited only by the handset’s and as it has the advantage of sending multimedia data [6]. MMS Center (MMSC) capabilities. The standard is not However, the growth of MMS technology was restricted used widely yet, because it must be supported by the because of reasons such as high-cost of sending multime- availability of sophisticated mobile phone and MMSC dia message, high-prices of mobile devices and message capability [5]. size limitations [7]. In multimedia data transmission, Due to the authorization problem, we cannot change the MMS technology uses 2.5G or 3G network with speeds up message size that is received and forwarded to the recipi- to 384 Kbps [8]. In this work, we make some improve- ent. We use the MMS technology standard that has been ments on the MMS application by implementing a few provided by the operator. We develop a data transmission techniques before data transmission to the recipient user. method with improved MMS technology for client-server The MMS server is more known as MMS center application. We attempt to make MMS technology more (MMSC) that is the center of the MMS system. MMSC adaptive and cost-effective to overcome the limitations in performs a lot of functions, such as store MMS messages, the maximum size for developing client-server applica- forward MMS messages to external networks, send MMS tions. messages as email using the SMTP protocol over the The main goals of this research are: (i) to explore data Internet, send MMS messages via the SMS for enabling transmission for large multimedia file using MMS tech- users of non-MMS phones to receive MMS messages and nology (ii) to develop data transmission by implementing iJIM – Volume 6, Issue 1, January 2012 25 PAPER AN ADAPTIVE AND COST-EFFECTIVE DATA TRANSMISSION FRAMEWORK USING MMS TECHNOLOGY FOR CLIENT-SERVER APPLICATION TABLE I. MOBILE NETWORK CAPABILITY FOR MMS TECHNOLOGY Technology Data Rate Frequency Mobile Technology GSM 9.6 kbps 900/1800/1900MHz GPRS 171.2 kbps 900/1800/1900MHz EDGE 384 kbps 900/1800/1900MHz 3G / UMTS 2 Mbps 1885 – 2200 MHz HSPDA 14.4Mbps 850/900 /2100MHz HSUPA 5.76Mbps 850/900 /2100MHz LTE 100 Mbps 900 /1700/1800//2100Mhz WiMAX 1 Gbps 2 GHz to 11 GHz In this research, we use data transmission method of the Figure 1. MMS architecture for data transmission existing MMS protocol. We use mobile communications network that is provided by the service provider. We per- view the text as SMS messages and the whole message via form the development of MMS technology within the Web or WAP and perform content adaptation [3]. The creation of MMS message by implementing some tech- client-server applications have a client program which is niques in order to send large file size where the existing running on one end of the system that requests and re- MMS technology cannot do it. This method is expected to ceives a service from server program running on another be used in large multimedia message delivery end system. This will be different if the client-server pro- The developed system is a client server application. As grams running on the computer, it is called a distributed we know that a mobile phone has many limitations com- application [9]. Figure 1 shows the MMS architecture for pared to a personal computer (PC) or a notebook. Building data transmission. the applications on mobile phone is rather complex con- On the client side, we develop MMS application by im- sidering its limitations. In developing the techniques to plementing some techniques, such as compression, split- improve the ability of the MMS technology in sending the ting, masking and cropping to get an adaptive and cost- message, there are several factors that should be consid- effective in message delivery of the large multimedia file. ered, such as resizing, converting, compressing, splitting, Then, on the server side, we develop Internet application masking and cropping. These techniques can be used to to use the data which is sent by the user to the mobile overcome the problem of size limitation for data transmis- phone recipient which serves as the gateway between sion. These techniques have advantages as well as limita- client and server. We implement merging and decompres- tions depending on the type of application. These tech- sion techniques when downloading data from gateway to niques are briefly described below: store into the database server. Currently, MMS technology still uses 2.5G or 3G mo- A. Resizing bile network to transmit multimedia message, where This technique is widely used in the current MMS ap- MMS does not use higher technology, such as 3.5G or plications. Message that has a size in excess of the permit- HSDPA. The development of MMS technology should be ted capacity will be resized and as a result the quality will supported by the ability of MMSC that is provided by the be reduced [10]. operator and mobile phone features such as camera, voice B. Converting recording and video. In future, we believe that MMS tech- nology will be able to send larger data than now, and then This technique is normally used in the MMS center to implementation techniques on the MMS application will perform content adaptation process. For example, an audio give a few contributions to advancement of MMS tech- file format allowed by the MMS center is AMR format. If nology. The use of MMS technology is easier (like send- we want to send an MP3 file, the MMS center must con- ing SMS) compared to making Internet connection on vert MP3 files into AMR before forwarding it to the re- mobile phone to access Internet applications. Besides that, cipient [11]. we can make the system more secured because the user C. Compressing sends the data without opening the system on the Internet to upload multimedia data directly. The developed system Compression techniques can be used to overcome the will be an integrated system. Table 1 shows the mobile problem of MM delivery of larger size files. By using the network capability for MMS technology. compression technique, we can reduce the file size, thus simplify the delivery process. This technique can also Currently, MMS technology performs resizing process to restore the quality as the original file is recovered using send larger multimedia message but the maximum size is decompression techniques [12].