Reliability, costs and delay performance of sending short message service in wireless systems

The short message service (SMS) in wireless systems provides the capability of limited-size data messages to subscriber's cellular phone. The application of SMS includes: sending paging message, sending pre-defined text messages, sending notification of E-mail, FAX or voice mail to subscribers. In a cellular system, one way to deliver SMS is using control channels. We discuss the reliability, cost and delay performance of SMS delivery using different paging and retry methods. The reliability of SMS delivery is defined as the probability of successful delivery of a SMS message. The cost is defined as the words in a forward control channel per SMS delivery. The load of forward control channels is already very heavy and the impact of SMS to the capacity of forward control channels should be kept as less as possible. Certain retry methods can be used to increase SMS delivery reliability. These retry have different costs and delay performance. The design of good retry method needs a good understanding of the system environment and a sound performance analysis. In this paper, an analytical model is derived to consider the impact of the above unreliable factors. By probability analysis, the costs, delay and reliability of different methods are calculated and compared. A physical case is studied using the devised methods.