Analysis of the Reliability of a Nationwide Short Message Service

—SMS has been arguably the most popular wireless data service for cellular networks. Due to its ubiquitous availability and universal support by mobile handsets and cellular carriers, it is also being considered for emergency notification and other mission-critical applications. Despite its increased popularity, the reliability of SMS service in real-world operational networks has received little study so far. In this work, we investigate the reliability of SMS by analyzing traces collected from a nationwide cellular network over a period of three weeks. Although the SMS service incorporates a number of reliability mechanisms such as delivery acknowledgement and multiple retries, our study shows that its reliability is not as good as we expected. For example the message delivery failure ratio is as high as 5.1% during normal operation conditions. We also analyze the performance of the service under stressful conditions, and in particular during a “flash-crowd” event that occurr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Xiaoqiao Meng, Petros Zerfos, Vidyut Samanta, Starsky H. Y. Wong, Songwu Lu
• Keywords: Cellular Network, Communications, INFOCOM 2007, Message Delivery, SMS Service