In the broadband era, narrowband short message service (SMS) is still the most popular wireless data service. Many studies have been conducted to investigate the performance of SMS based on the arrival rates of short messages. From Chunghwa Telecom's commercial SMS call data records, we observed that even if the SMS arrival rates are the same, the distributions for the number of SMS arrivals per half hour are quite different for various observed days. We further identify that for the SMS traffic in a specific day, there are non-burst and burst periods. This paper investigates the SMS behaviors on weekdays, weekends, and holidays (specifically, new years' days and eves). With the assistance of kernel-based fitting method, we derive the SMS arrival number distributions of various traffic types and observed days. Our approach fits each SMS arrival number distribution by three cubic polynomial functions that can accurately capture the SMS behaviors. On the basis of the SMS arrival number distributions derived from our model, the mobile operators have better understanding about the volumes of short messages in different times and days, which can be used to design more flexible short message charging rates. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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.