On the Suitability of the Short Message Service for Emergency Warning Systems

Author

Pries, Rastin ; HoBfeld, Tobias ; Tran-Gia, Phuoc

Author_Institution

Dept. of Distributed Syst., Wurzburg Univ.

Volume

2

fYear

2006

fDate

7-10 May 2006

Firstpage

991

Lastpage

995

Abstract

The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is the most popular standard for mobile phones in the world with about 1.57 billion customers. The short message service (SMS) in GSM allows amongst others the transmission of short text messages to mobile phones. In case of an emergency, the SMS can be used to warn a large number of individuals. However, the short message delivery is performed on best-effort basis and no quality of service (QoS) agreement is given, i.e., there is no guarantee how long it takes a message to reach the recipient or that the message will be successfully delivered. In this paper, we investigate the message loss probability and the transmission time by performing measurements with different scenarios in a public GSM network. Then, we identify problems according to the requirements for an emergency warning system. We present a solution based on the cell broadcast in GSM and show numerical results regarding the delay and the capacity of the SMS

Keywords

cellular radio; electronic messaging; emergency services; GSM; Global System for Mobile Communications; SMS; cell broadcast; emergency warning systems; message loss probability; mobile phones; short message service; Alarm systems; Communication standards; GSM; Loss measurement; Message service; Mobile handsets; Performance evaluation; Propagation losses; Quality of service; Time measurement; GSM; SMS; emergency warning system; transmission delay measurements;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Vehicular Technology Conference, 2006. VTC 2006-Spring. IEEE 63rd

Conference_Location

Melbourne, Vic.

ISSN

1550-2252

Print_ISBN

0-7803-9391-0

Electronic_ISBN

1550-2252

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/VETECS.2006.1682973

Filename

1682973