Short message service (SMS) was first introduced by European wireless network operators in 1991, to enable mobile subscribers to easily send and receive text messages with their wireless handsets. The SS7 network was primarily engineered for voice call setup and was latter on extended to introduce mobile-to-mobile SMS based communications.

As convergence of wireless communication networks and Internet data networks has increased, short messaging has evolved to become a very popular communication mean not only used by users, but also by terminals and applications. This evolution has lead to new usage patterns and a high growth of text messaging for which the SS7 infrastructure and SMSC network elements weren’t initially designed for.

AerVox SMS Way provides low-latency real-time complex intelligent routing, protocol conversion, load balance and flow control capabilities to handle both Mobile Originated (MO) and Mobile Terminated (MT) SMS traffic travelling through the operators’ network.

Key Benefits

CAPEX for new infrastructure reduction by using existing infrastructure as much as possible - offloading traffic from expensive SS7 signalling and SMSCs.

OPEX reduction by transferring load from SS7 network to IP network.

Network Optimization through an efficient traffic handling to cope with complex flows and high SMS load traffic scenarios.

Income increase by ensuring chargeable traffic will not be lost because of network resources unavailability.

Improved end-user experience by avoiding traffic loss because of network resources unavailability or bad QoS.

The SMS Way’s handles the SMS traffic sent from applications, users or any other source - mobile-to-mobile, mobile-to-application (application-terminated SMS), and application-to-mobile (application-originated SMS) - and routes it in the most appropriate way (optimal efficiency, maximum performance and maximum reliability) to the destination, regardless of the underlying protocols provided by the network.

Main Features

SS7, SIGTRAN and SMPP support. 

SMS Relay or Store-and-Forward method support.

SS7 network offloading - to relieve the SS7 network of some of the SMS traffic, by switching this traffic to the IP network. When an SMS destination is directly or indirectly reachable trough the IP network the SMS Way can perform the appropriate actions to transform the message and to deliver it to the IP network through several interfaces (SMPP, SIGTRAN).

Mobile-to-mobile and Application-to-mobile SMSCs offloading - to relieve the SMSCs of some of the SMS traffic, by performing a First Time Delivery attempt to deliver the short message to the network directly. If short message delivery is successful, the SMS Way relieves the existing SMSC(s) of storing and forwarding it. The short message can either be forwarded or kept in the SMS WAY whenever the first delivery attempt is unsuccessful.

Traffic load balance among possible destinations - allows outgoing messages to be distributed amongst the existing or available destinations within a group of similar network element (group of SMSCs, Application Servers, etc.).

Flow Control actions on the outgoing SMS traffic - protects the network elements, whether they are Application Servers, SMSCs or any other element, from overload situations by managing the outgoing SMS traffic throughput for each destination. Flow control is mainly intended to work when the destinations elements are connected to the SMS Way through an IP interface.