Transmission Policies for Multi-Segment Short Messages

The performance of single-segment short messaging service (SMS) (i.e., the message sizes are smaller than 140 octets) has been intensively investigated. On the other hand, multisegment messages (with sizes larger than 140 octets) are seldom evaluated in the literature. This paper proposes analytical models to study two transmission policies for multisegment short messages. We show how to improve the performance of multisegment short message delivery by selecting appropriate transmission parameters: the retransmission interval and the maximum number of transmissions. The proposed models are validated by measured data collected from the largest telecom operator in Taiwan over a period of six months. We provide useful guidelines to configure parameters for SMS transmission policy. Numerical examples showed that the performance can be improved by over 20% in terms of successful delivery ratio.