Open Mobile Alliance

Principles

Mission

To provide interoperable service enablers working across countries, operators and mobile terminals.

Network-agnostic

The OMA only standardises applicative protocols; OMA specifications are meant to work with any cellular network technologies being used to provide networking and data transport. These networking technology are specified by outside parties. In particular, OMA specifications for a given function are the same with either GSM, UMTS or CDMA2000 networks.

Voluntary adherence

Adherence to the standards is entirely voluntary; the OMA does not have a mandative role. The OMA is not a formal government-sponsored standards organization like the ITU, but a forum for industry stakeholders to agree on common specifications for products and services. The goal is that by agreeing on common standards, stakeholders will be able to "share slices from a larger pie".

"FRAND" intellectual property licensing

OMA members that own intellectual property rights (e.g. patents) on technologies that are essential to the realization of a specification agree in advance to provide licenses to their technology on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms to other members.

Legal status

OMA is incorporated in California, USA.

History

The OMA was created in June 2002 as an answer to the proliferation of industry forums each dealing with a few application protocols: WAP Forum (focused on browsing and device provisioning protocols), the Wireless Village (focused on instant messaging and presence), The SyncML Initiative (focused on data synchronization), the Location Interoperability Forum, the Mobile Games Interoperability Forum and the Mobile Wireless Internet Forum. Each of these forums had its bylaws, its decision-taking procedures, its release schedules, and in some instances there was some overlap in the specifications, causing duplication of work. The OMA was created to gather these initiatives under a single umbrella.

Members include traditional wireless industry players such as equipment and mobile systems manufacturers (Ericsson, Thomson, Huawei, ZTE, Reti Radiotelevisive Digitali, Nokia, Openwave, Sony, Philips, Motorola, Samsung, LG Electronics, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm) and mobile operators (Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, LG Telecom), and also software vendors (Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Oracle Corporation, Symbian, Celltick, Expway, Mformation, InnoPath, Motive).

Relation to other standards bodies

The OMA liaises with other standards bodies on a regular basis to avoid overlap in specifications:

3GPP

3GPP2

IETF

W3C

Standard specifications

The OMA maintains a number of specifications, including

Browsing specifications, now called "Browser and Content", previously called WAP browsing. In their current version, these specifications rely essentially on XHTML Mobile Profile.

MMS specifications for multimedia messaging

OMA DRM specifications for Digital Rights Management

OMA Instant Messaging and Presence Service (OMA IMPS) specification, which is a system for instant messaging on mobile phones (formerly known as Wireless Village).

OMA SIMPLE IM Instant messaging based on SIP-SIMPLE (see Session Initiation Protocol)

OMA CAB Converged Address Book, a social address book service standard.

OMA CPM Converged IP Messaging, the underlying enabler for Rich Communication Services.

OMA LAWMO (OMA LAWMO) Specifications for Lock and Wipe functionality LAWMO.

OMA LWM2M (OMA LWM2M) Specifications for Lightweight Machine to Machine functionality.

OMA Client Provisioning (OMA CP) specification for Client Provisioning.

OMA Data Synchronization (OMA DS) specification for Data Synchronization using SyncML.

OMA Device Management (OMA DM) specification for Device Management using SyncML.

OMA BCAST specification for Mobile Broadcast Services.

OMA RME specification for Rich Media Environment.

OMA OpenCMAPI Connection Management APIs

OMA PoC specification for Push to talk Over Cellular (called "PoC").

OMA Presence SIMPLE specification for Presence based on SIP-SIMPLE (see Session Initiation Protocol).

OMA Service Environment

FUMO Firmware update

SUPL, an IP-based service for assisted GPS on handsets

MLP, an IP-based protocol for obtaining the position/location of mobile handset

WAP1, Wireless Application Protocol 1, 5-layer stack of protocols

OMA LOCSIP Location in SIP/IP Core