A study of the short message service of a nationwide cellular network (original) (raw)
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We build an efficient and reliable data transport protocol on top of the Short Message Service (SMS). We conduct a series of experiments to characterize SMS behaviour under bursty, unconventional workloads. This study examines how variables such as the transmission order, delay between transmissions, the network interface used, and the time-of-day affect the service. We present the design and implementation of our transport protocol. We show that by adapting to the unique channel conditions of SMS we can reduce message overheads by as much as 50% and increase data throughput by as much as 545% over the approach used by existing applications. Although the transport protocol can provide efficient, low-bandwidth, moderate-latency data communication between mobile devices throughout the world, we believe that this work has the largest potential impact in developing regions where SMS is often the only option for wireless data communication.
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SMS has been arguably the most popular wireless data service for cellular networks. Due to its ubiquitous availability and universal support by mobile handsets and cellular carriers, it is also being considered for emergency notification and other mission-critical applications. Despite its increased popularity, the reliability of SMS service in real-world operational networks has received little study so far. In this work, we investigate the reliability of SMS by analyzing traces collected from a nationwide cellular network over a period of three weeks. Although the SMS service incorporates a number of reliability mechanisms such as delivery acknowledgement and multiple retries, our study shows that its reliability is not as good as we expected. For example the message delivery failure ratio is as high as 5.1% during normal operation conditions. We also analyze the performance of the service under stressful conditions, and in particular during a "flash-crowd" event that occurred in New Year's Eve of 2005. Two important factors that adversely affect reliability of SMS are also examined: bulk message delivery that may induce network-wide congestion, and the topological structure of the social network formed by SMS users, which may facilitate quick propagation of viruses or other malware.
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Daily activity of the users of a mobile-phone network is represented as a sequence of input and output calls and of input and output text messages. Each such sequence corresponds to its spectrum, the distribution of short two-letter sequences of the same type. It is shown that the spectra of any user's sequences are stable, i.e. reproduced daily. Based on this, the notion of a user's strategy is introduced. The number of different strategies appears to be limited, in the sense that the number of user groups with the same strategy is sufficiently small.
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The Short Message Service (SMS) is one of the most ubiquitous wireless technologies on Earth. Each year hundreds of billions of messages are sent, demand continues to grow, and competition between cellular providers is driving prices down. These trends create practical opportunities for SMS in today's mobile systems. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a robust SMS-based data channel, or SMS-NIC, that runs on a variety of mobile platforms. Through integration with an existing mobile system, we show that the SMS-NIC has little operational overhead and provides efficient, reliable transport for large messages sent over the cellular network. We motivate the design of the SMS-NIC through a characterization of SMS using workloads consisting of bursts of messages between cell phones tethered to Linux PCs and between smartphones. This analysis differs from previous SMS studies by focusing on transmission patterns that differ from normal SMS use. Through this characterization we show that bidirectional traffic and the choice of hardware have a significant effect on transmission rate, delay, and message reordering. We also show that burst size has no effect on SMS, losses are rare, and messages may be duplicated during transport.
Analysis of the Evolution of Terminal Devices in the Use of SMS Service
The use of new services in communication systems often means reducing the use of existing services or even complete substitution with new services. The development of smart mobile devices as well as reducing the price of data traffic in mobile internet access, makes changes in the current trends of exchanging (primarily text) messages into mobile communications. Statistics show reducing the current growth in the number of sent SMS (Short Message Service) messages, and alternative will represent services such as e-mail and IM (Instant Messaging) communications. An increasing number of applications that enable IM communication (Skype, Facebook, Viber, ...) and abundance of their use by end users are indicative factor that such a mode of communication is becoming a common. This research is directed towards the analysis of forecasting the growth of smart mobile devices to the global data traffic and new offerings for service that meet customer expectations for multimedia. An important f...