Evaluating Quality of Service for Short Message Service as a Platform to Transmit Seismic Data in Earthquake Early Warning System

Short Message Service (SMS) is the most popular data service offered by all mobile operators and has been used in many applications such as advertising, mobile banking, alerting and notifications. This paper presents the findings obtained from the study to evaluate SMS as a platform to transmit data in the EEWS uplink. The evaluation criteria used was SMS delay. A prototype to send and deliver SMS carrying the seismic data in the three operators' networks was created. The delay for successful delivered SMSs in the different operators' network was evaluated and compared with the standard delay, which can be tolerated in Earthquake Early Warning System (EEWS) to conclude if SMS can be used to transmit seismic data in EEWS. The result showed that although the delays in the operators' network were varying, the delays exceeded the EEWS maximum delay that can be tolerated. This signifies that SMS is not a reliable platform to transmit seismic data in EEWS.