The annual Mobile World Congress, one of the most important events in the mobile telecommunications industry, will kick off in the city of Barcelona on Monday.

The four-day event will bring together around 70,000 delegates from all over the world to the Catalan city where issues such as Over The Top (OTT) services are likely to be high on the agenda.

These services will allow users to participate in chats, send messages and make calls with a simultaneous exchange of images or video. However, there is still a debate in the industry about what is exactly the best way to present these services, be it through apps, platforms to share multimedia content or services such as Acme Packet's "Session Border Controller," which aims to guarantee security in communications.

The year of 2013 is also expected to be the year of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) communications system. There are already around 40 networks for this fourth generation (4G) around the world and it is expected to grow to around 50 percent of all networks by 2015-2016.

Meanwhile, the increased use of 4G opens the door to an expansion in consumer video, with a subsequent rise in traffic. Traffic management will continue to be a major factor to be discussed with companies such as Citrix Bytemobile working with operators such as Vodafone, SFR and Telefonica to help meet the new challenges in traffic management.

Machine to Machine (M2M) is also likely to be high on the agenda, given that by 2020 it is predicted there will be 12 billion M2M connections around the world.

M2M is viewed in many circles as the future of consumerism and of the electronics industry with clients able to shop and pay, among other things, through their mobile phones.

The Congress will feature around 1,500 exhibitors, a special App Planet zone for applications, as well as conferences, forums and keynote speakers from the industry as well as providing a possibility for networking.