SMPP – Short Message Peer-to-Peer

Protocol-messaging solution – SMPP – Short Message Peer-to-Peer

Telecommunication industry’s protocol “SMPP” is used to exchange messages (SMS) between the peer entities e.g. short messages offering services centers. This protocol is capable to submit messages in bulk by a third party such as news organization. Anyhow, the main function of short message peer-to-peer protocol is to switch over the SMS messages between two be aware of each other entities.

  1. SMSC (Short Message Service Centre) that handles SMS messages of a mobile operative network.
  2. ESME (External Short Messaging Entity) is an entity, to swap over SMS messages by the mobile subscribers.

A little Irish company “Aldiscon” was at first designed the SMPP. And Ian J Chambers (developer of this protocol) tests its functionality without taking any help from the “SS7” simulation and testing equipment that allows the user to reproduce a realistic network. But later protocol right is given away to the “Logica” which further handed over it in the year 1999 to the SMPP Developer’s Forum, Afterward, it was known as “SMS Forum” but now it has been parted. After SMS forum’s disbanding, its ownership is returned to “Acision” once again. One can browse existing relevant websites in order to read about the SMPP protocol specifications.

But SMPP Ver 3.3 specification and SMPP Ver 3.4 specification for that protocol are yet in use but ver 3.4 is a well-known while ver 3.3 is used by a few mobile operators for the old SMSCs that put into practice the version 3.3 specification. Making the connection to an SMSC (Short Message Service Centre) with the help of SMPP will be often confusing due to TON (Type of Number) and NPI (Numbering Plan Indicator) like terminology usages. Version “5.0” specification was introduced but it has been failed to receive any significant market acceptance.

Moreover, in some cases, SMPP implementations require from you to put forward, in a single attempt a long message while in other cases you have to carry out message segmentation such as with of help TLV parameters (addition of provider’s own parameters).  TLV parameter’s format can be based on the sequence as “Tag”, “Length”, and “Value” parameters.

SMPP protocol is consisted of binary encoded data unit (request or response) in the form of packets that function over TCP session (layer 4) of ISO model. In general, SMPP PDU is consisted of PDU header that may include: command_length, command_id, command_status and sequence_number while PDU Body is based on service_type, source_addr_ton, source_addr_npi, source_addr, dest_addr_ton, dest_addr_npi, protocol_id, data_coding, sm_default_msg_id, sm_length, short_message and so on.

You can arrange a Cisco connection so to throw the messages or scheduled event notifications as text messages with SMTP usage to the text attuned cell phones. The same activities can be performed in the cases of wireless devices. But SMS messages measurement limits lengthwise can be varied and is usually depending upon the different service providers. Anyway, character set is used to compose the text of message and these on hand sets may include: Default Alphabet 7-bits characters, IA5/ASCII 7-bits characters, Latin/Hebrew 8-bits characters and Unicode 16-bits characters sets etc.

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