Enhancing SMS as ubiquitous, stateful and secured transport bearer

Abstract

This thesis is about Enhancing SMS as Ubiquitous, Stateful and Secured Transport Bearer . SMS (Short Message Service) was originally designed for messaging between two individuals using mobile phones this is defined in GSM standard 03.40; and technically called SMS pointto-point. SMS point-to-point offers universal roaming in vehicular state where both endpoints are newlinemobile phones. Moreover, self-configurable nature of SMS combined with wide availability of cellular networks made service providers interested to use SMS as another function, i.e., a transport bearer for information access. When SMS is used as transport bearer it is termed as SMS-data, where one endpoint is always an application or service at Internet or private network. In recent past, SMS is increasingly being used as a transport bearer for services starting from healthcare, telematics to actionable information. Also, it is the only data bearer that is newlineavailable on budget phones, and legacy networks in developing countries. SMS also happens to be the only data bearer for most prepaid subscribers even in GPRS and EDGE networks. Therefore, SMS is poised to become the transport bearer for information exchange for the masses in the developing nations where 60% of the mobile phones belong. Out of these phones 75% to 95% are prepaid subscribers. In data networks, a client device connected to any ISP (Internet Service Provider) can communicate with any service hosted in some other ISP s network. In cellular networks, an outgoing voice call or SMS (point-to-point) from any network can be routed to any other mobile phone in some other network. When SMS is used as data (or transport) bearer, it is not so SMS newlinefrom any mobile phone cannot be routed to any application in any data network; it must be routed only to services offered by the home network. In other words, SMS-data routing is not ubiquitous or it does not interoperate.