Method of routing a short message and an apparatus for routing a short message

Abstract

In a method of routing a short message with high or low priority from a service centre to a mobile station in a public land mobile network providing both packet data service and circuit switched service, a choice is made, in advance, as to whether the short meassage should be received by the mobile station either via a specific one of the services or via any of the services. Based upon said choice in step, the priority of the short message sent from the service centre, and an indication of whether the mobile station is reachable via one, both or none of the services, a route via one of the services, a route via both services or no route at all is selected. If a route via one of the services is selected, the short message is routed in accordance with the selected route. If a route via both services is selected, the route via the service having a higher preference than the other service is selected, and the short message is routed in accordance with the route via said service having the higher preference. If the routing of the short message to the mobile station is unsuccessful via the route via said service having the higher preference, the short message is routed in accordance with the route via said other service having lower preference.

Description

[0001] The invention relates to a short message routing method and apparatus in a public land mobile network providing both packet data service and circuit switched service.STATE OF THE ART[0002] Short message service in general is widely known in mobile telecommunication networks. A special type of such a network, called GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), has been specified by ETSI (European Telecommunication Standardization Institute) in the GSM specification GSM 03.60, Feb. 27, 1997, Version 1.1. Both mobile terminated and mobile originated short message transfer between the various nodes in the GPRS communication system, are described in this GSM specification.[0003] The specification does not give the network operator and / or the subscriber or end-user any flexibility in controlling how the short messages are routed through the network.[0004] This will be described below with reference to FIGS. 1-4 on the appended drawing.[0005] FIG. 1 schematically illustrates an embodiment o...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

The specification does not give the network operator and / or the subscriber or end-user any flexibility in controlling how the short messages are routed through the network.

The two transfer procedures described above in connection with FIGS. 2 and 3 do not provide any flexibility in that the SMS is always sent first via GPRS and in that the operator of the network and / or the end-user of the MS, i.e. the user of the terminating MS, is not allowed to control how the SMS should be routed through the network.

Also in mobile originating transfers of SMSs, the SMSs are always sent first over GPRS, thus, no flexibility is provided for mobile originating SMS transfer since the network operator and / or the end-user of the MS are not allowed to control how the mobile originating SMS should be routed through the network.

As a consequence, the network operator has no way to re-route the SMS over CS in case of GPRS capacity problems, congestion problems, network problems etc.

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