A novel design of instant messaging service extended from short message service with XMPP

Use of the short message service has been growing tremendously in the last few years. The instant messaging service has been getting more and more popular, too. To bridge them is becoming a new promising niche because people enjoy getting messages instantly, anywhere, at any time. However, there is still not a common, unified and open standard. Big instant message providers, such as AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and ICQ, dominate Internet instant message systems via proprietary protocols. Although major handset manufactures, e.g., Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia, formed the Wireless Village Initiative to ensure interoperability of their instant message services particularly, it requires buying their new handsets to support it. However, people do not change handsets often. On the other hand, every carrier operator has been trying to refine its own interface to short message application services with the intention to cover the complexity and security of communication with its own short message service center. Hence, we propose an infrastructure, based on the XML-based protocol, XMPP, not only to simplify interconnections between Internet instant message systems and short message systems, but also to support legacy handsets for the instant message service. Besides, most operators' short message service centers do not guarantee delivery in order. Therefore, we are also going to introduce a mechanism inside our servers in order to make in-order delivery sensitive services applicable on top of this infrastructure.