Cost Analysis of Short Message Retransmissions

Short message service (SMS) is the most popular mobile data service today. In Taiwan, a subscriber sends more than 200 short messages per year on average. The huge demand for SMS significantly increases network traffic, and it is essential that mobile operators should provide efficient SMS delivery mechanism. In this paper, we study the short message retransmission policies and derive some facts about these policies. Then, we propose an analytic model to investigate the short message retransmission performance. The analytic model is validated against simulation experiments. We also collect SMS statistics from a commercial mobile telecommunications network. Our study indicates that the performance trends for the analytic/simulation models and the measured data are consistent.