Modelling and Analysis of Short Message Traffic in Terrestrial Mobile Communication Networks

Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) applications, such as WhatsApp, are becoming more and more popular today. With the increasing number of messages, a realistic model for this traffic is needed. This paper surveys the characteristics of MIM, Instant Messaging (IM) and Short Message Service (SMS), which are found in the literature. In addition, it also connects the results of this comparison to the analysis of modern short messages. The analysed thread-related characteristics suggest that the behaviour of SMS users is approximating those of MIM users. This indicates that with an accurate model of today's SMS, for whom rich datasets already exist and are therefore easier to access, MIM can be modelled to some extent, too.