Roadmap and Strategy for Personal Communications
From Symbian Developer Community
This roadmap and strategy was last updated on June 28th 2010.
Contents |
Overview
An overview of the domain containing its definition, key drivers and contents can be found here
What's important for Personal Communications?
The Symbian Foundation's been gathering ideas and feedback from our community and collected the following things that are important to our members for the Personal Communications technology domain. Remember though, we're always open to new ideas - post something on the forum or comment on this page if you've got anything to add.
User Experience
Improving the user experience in this domain primarily the experience of making and receiving voice calls and other use cases core to voice and video telephony. They key is to make the rich set of services that the platform has to offer available to the user whilst guiding simply to the most important use cases such as voice calls.
Standards Compliance
Offering as complete a set of telephony standards as possible, primarily those set by the 3GPP body but also other partners of the 3GPP2 project such as ARIB, CCSA, TIA, TTA and TTC
High Speed Data
Providing ubiquitous, cellular based high speed data access technologies and optimising the platform to take advantage of these speeds.
Convergence
Convergencing of voice and multimedia; data and voice; mobile and fixed-line services to bring a greater user experience for end users as well as enabling applications that can leverage a wider breadth of services.
Where 's Personal Communications heading?
Based on what's important for the domain, this is Symbian's vision for where we're heading, what initiatives are key for the technology domain, and what is going to drive valuable contributions. We are of course open to all contributions, however large or small, this is just to guide a bit of your thinking - see below for which of these initiatives we're looking for you to contribute to.
User Experience
User experience is the key decision factor for end users choosing devices and Symbian software powers more smartphones than any other OS [1]. The paradigm shift in smartphones to touchscreen interfaces has also opened up a wealth of opportunities for significant changes in user experience and creating more freedom for us to make compelling applications in the Personal Communications domain.
Initiatives:
- Short term improvements to go after some of the easiest opportunities today
- DirectUI - the total face-lift to the phone appliaction and its associated UIs
Standards Compliance
Symbian has been predominantly deployed on UMTS / GSM networks, and provides a really high degree of compliance for these standards.
However there is an opportunity for Symbian to increase its compliance with the other standards employed worldwide.
Also, standards are always evolving - we want to maintain the great compliance Symbian currently has with new technologies as they emerge.
Initiatives:
- Support TD-SCDMA for 3G networks employed by CMCC with their ~493m subscribers
- Support CDMA for networks employed throughout the US and Korea
High Speed Data
Symbian is currently the only open OS which has devices offering 7.2 / 5.7 Mbps HSPA. However, tomorrows data technologies will require speeds of 100Mbps.
Symbian^3 brings 'Freeway', setting Symbian in place to reach these throughput requirements, but much else must be done to enable these technologies
Initiatives:
- Develop solutions for LTE - the dominant next generation high speed data standard
- SMP optimisations using Freeway to enhance throughput in high speed data use-cases
Convergence
Most competing platforms limit the ability to deploy VoIP systems either due to a lack of appropriate runtimes; a failure to enable service integration; or blocking of after-market apps. Symbian's open model enables VoIP application developers and service providers to develop and integrate such services into the platform, and the introduction of 'Freeway' provides the building blocks for bearer mobility.
Also, there is a evolution of the way Multimedia, Data, presence and location awareness are integrated into the traditional point-to-point voice communications channel.
Initiatives:
- Provide advanced VoIP technologies: Voice conferencing and video sharing, location awareness
- All IP services will drive telephony convergence and flexible bearer mobility
What's in Symbian^3 today?
For more detailed information on what's in Symbian today and what's coming in the future, take a look at the wikis and backlogs for the packages in the domain.
| Category | Feature | Package |
| IP Telephony | VoIP over SIP | iptelephony |
| Telephony | Touch UI Phone App | phone |
| Multimode (2.5G / 3G / 3.5G) | cellularsrv | |
| SMS & EMS | cellularsrv | |
| SIM Application Toolkit | phonesrv | |
| Packet Data | Mulitple, variable QoS PDP contexts | cellularsrv |
| GPRS - Classes A,B,C (R97/98) | cellularsrv | |
| HSDPA / HSUPA | cellularsrv | |
| HSCSD | cellularsrv | |
| Video Telephony | Video Telephony Framework* | videotelephony |
| Video Telephony Application | videotelephony | |
| Real Time Multimedia Sharing | Camera View Sharing over SIP | mmsharinguis |
| Video Clip Sharing over SIP | mmsharinguis | |
Note: Push-to-Talk was supported in previous versions of Symbian (until S^2), however it has been deprecated and is no longer in active maintenance or included in PDKs from S^3 onwards. However, the code still exists in our S^2 RCL so you're interested in maintaining it then why not get in touch.
* Note this currently excludes a complete Video Telephony stack, but PacketVideo and Sasken have both proposed solutions and the PacketVideo solution has been recommended by the FRC for review by the other councils.
New Features from Symbian^3
| Feature | Target Objectives | Contributor |
| Support for Screenplay | UX Competitiveness | Nokia |
| Enhanced QoS Support | Standards Compliance | Nokia |
| VoIP Conference Calling | Telephony Convergence | Nokia |
| VoIP Video | Telephony Convergence | Nokia |
| Touch UI Enhancements | UX Competitiveness | Nokia |
| SMP Safe Telephony | Performance & Battery Life | Nokia |
Symbian^4 Roadmap
| Feature | Target Objectives | Contributor |
| Direct UI | UX Competitiveness | Nokia |
| Migration to TMS APIs | Standards Compliance | Nokia |
| Video Sharing in VoIP | Telephony Convergence | Nokia |
| Multiclient Access | Standards Compliance | Nokia |
| 3GPP R7 Priority Compliance | Standards Compliance | Nokia |
| Multiclient USSD Framework | Standards Compliance | OpenCode |
| SHAI Abstraction Compliance | General Objectives | Nokia |
| TD-SCDMA Support | Standards Compliance | Seeking Contributors* |
* We are currently seeking community members interested in working together to provide a TD-SCDMA reference design.
Symbian^5 And Beyond
The most significant developments for S^5 and beyond will be for LTE - The LTE Working Group has been busy analysing the requirements and defining a timeline for when these requirement will be needed in the market.
These requirements now have leads associated with them who are busily seeking out contributors to help fulfil these requirements.
Opportunities For You To Contribute
LTE Data Networking (High speed packet data)
LTE is the Long Term Evolution of the current HSPA specification of the 3GPP. It targets an average user throughput of three- to four-times the exisitng downlink speeds (100Mbps), and two to three times the levels in the uplink (50Mbps).
See the LTE WG for more details.
Voice over LTE (High speed packet data)
LTE is anall-IPnetwork meaning voice traffic cannot be carried on the traditional circuit-switched channels, but rather using VoIP. There will be some significant work to be done to enable this on Symbian
See the LTE WG for more details.
LTE Supplementary Service (High speed packet data)
LTE will also require some additional services to be implemented such as SMS over IP and Fallback to circuit switched networks
See the LTE WG for more details.
TD-SCDMA Support (Standards Compliance)
TD-SCDMA is an air interface standard of the UMTS specification and whilst the Symbian platform is TD-SCDMA ready, there is an opportunity for some customisation for the largest adopter of TD-SDCMA technology[2]: China Mobile
CDMA Support (Standards Compliance)
There are a number of operators using CDMA networks worldwide[3], and whilst the Symbian platform has some legacy support for CDMA[4] there is a significant development opportunity fulfil the service requirements of CDMA networks.
Rich Communication Suite (Telephony Convergence)
RCS enables the integration of services such as messaging and multimedia into the traditional point-to-point voice call to enrich the experience of users.
We now have an implementation of MSRP framework available in an FCL. To get involved in completing the requirements the go to this thread. Further information can also be found on in the Data Comms domain roadmap which leads the bulk of the RCS developments.
Hardware Abstraction Improvements (General Objectives)
Together with the SHAI initiative we'd like to improve the hardware abstraction for modem technologies, incorporating more generic functionality into the cellular baseband stack and providing concrete implementations for multiple modems.
We've defined a set of API's for modem adaptation and setout the changes that will be required to ETel and the CTSY/Dispatcher in order to support them. They broadly use the existing Dispatcher layer so there shouldn't be too much work to adapt these components to the new API. However we are always looking for contributors to help with this and more importantly provide adaptation code for real modems. One example you can get involved in is with the AT Modem Project which has been building on a test LTSY, contributed by Nokia, to productise it ready for use in a real device.
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