An efficient short messages transmission in cellular networks

A method for efficient short messages transmission in cellular networks is developed in this study. The number of short message service (SMS) messages is growing very rapidly, and existing cellular networks have to support a large number of SMS and signaling messages. The rate of SMS messages has already exceeded the rate of E-mail messages transmitted through the Internet, and their number keeps growing. SMS messages are characterized by a burst of a short, single packet message. Unfortunately, the protocols currently used by existing cellular networks cannot support this type of traffic efficiently. For this reason, SMS messages are currently transmitted through the signaling channel. Clearly, this usage of the signaling channel is far from being optimal, in terms of network resources utilization. Under certain conditions, it may even block the signaling channel. This study proposes to use a load-adaptive multiple access with congestion avoidance (LAMA/CA) for efficient short messages transmission in cellular networks. The LAMA/CA protocol is more stable, and much more efficient for transmitting SMS messages and signaling messages, than the existing method currently used in cellular networks. Moreover, the proposed method is superior to a collision-free protocol that uses a request to send (RTS) and clear to send (CTS) mechanism, over the range of packet lengths used for SMS messages and signaling messages.