Texting for Business: SMS as Ubiquitous, Portable, Stateful, and Secured Transport Bearer for Business Applications

Text message or SMS (Short Message Service) is designed for messaging between two mobile phones – this is defined in GSM standard 03.40; and technically called SMS point-to-point. Point-to-point SMS uses the HLR to locate a phone in the home or foreign network. HLR (Home Location Register) is a network element connected to the SS#7 network with a very sophisticated database that contains routing information and location of the mobile phone. This helps SMS to offer universal roaming and MNP (Mobile Number Portability) in a transparent manner. However, when SMS is used as transport bearer for mobile applications, it does not access the HLR to locate a service; therefore, a service outside of the home network cannot be accessed through Text message. In addition, following MNP, the services will be inaccessible. To allow SMS to access any business application anywhere in the world, it needs a different routing technology. This book presents a novel technology to overcome this challenge. This innovative technology uses a novel routing mechanism to route a SMS message to any service anywhere in the world. This makes a business application ubiquitous and MNP neutral for Text messages.