Towards a More Reliable Store-and-forward Protocol for Mobile Text Messages

Businesses often use mobile text messages (SMS) as a cost effective and universal way of communicating concise information to their customers. Today, these messages are usually sent via SMS brokers, which forward them further to the next stakeholder, typically the various mobile operators, and then the messages eventually reach the intended recipients. Infoflex Connect AB delivers an SMS gateway application to the brokers with the main responsibility of reliable message delivery within set quality thresholds. However, the protocols used for SMS communication are not designed for reliability and thus messages may be lost. In this position paper we deduce requirements for a new protocol for routing messages through the SMS gateway application running at a set of broker nodes, in order to increase the reliability. The requirements cover important topics for the required communication protocol such as event ordering, message handling and system membership. The specification of such requirements sets the foundation for the forthcoming design and implementation of such a protocol and its evaluation.