SMS based information retrieval system for low end mobile devices

Mobile phone is the most widely used portable device. Every mobile phone user can conveniently communicate with each other through SMS (Short Message Service) at very low price. It is so commonly used that, in some countries like China, an SMS culture has emerged. Although there are some SMS based applications in m-Learning, most of them are only for administrative purposes, like delivering messages to students as reminders or alerts for some learning activities. In this paper, we introduce a SMS Server [1] for querying information and knowledge by the use of SMS in a mobile learning environment. The proposed system consists of a GSM Module (GSMM), a Dialogue Control Module (DCM) which also works as a Querying Processing Module (QPM). GSMM includes a micro-controller and a GSM communication device with a SIM card in it. It processes the user's messages according to our defined protocol and acts as the interface between the mobile infrastructure and the rest of the system. DCM handles the content of the requesting messages and produces suitable querying tasks for QPM which in turn searches and matches information from Internet to produce suitable answering messages for the users according to their requesting messages.