Mobile Messaging Product Family
Innovative, modular solution, enabling operators to deliver advanced messaging without costly network over-engineering or overhaul
Overview
The global SMS market continues to grow, expanding beyond simple person-to-person text messaging to mobile-to-application and application-to-application services like tele-voting and telemetry. These newer forms of messaging create revenue opportunities, but they also create challenges for mobile network operators. The current SMS network architecture is built on legacy short message service centers (SMSCs), which support an antiquated “store-and-forward” architecture in which the SMS message is routed initially to the legacy SMSC, where it is stored and then forwarded to its recipient. This SMS delivery model is seriously outdated and inefficient because 85 to 95 percent of SMS messages can actually be delivered on the first attempt. These legacy SMSCs were designed to handle the relatively predictable traffic created by simple person-to-person text messaging. Unlike simple texting, applications such as tele-voting create large spikes in signaling traffic, which can strain the capacity of the SMSC and create network bottlenecks. In today’s fiercely competitive market, deploying additional message centers or expanding signaling bandwidth is not an economically viable approach.
Unfortunately, existing short message service centers (SMSCs) are no longer meeting operator needs. SMSCs have not kept up with the technology curve in terms of the cost of the equipment, performance and operating efficiency. They lack message-handling flexibility and do not support advanced services such as real-time pre-paid charging, firewall/SPAM control, real-time service monitoring and session initiation protocol (SIP)-based messaging. And, most legacy SMSCs still do not support First Delivery Attempt (FDA), which would help operators significantly improve the efficiency and performance of their networks. Using FDA, SMSCs would only have to handle the 15 percent of messages that truly need to be stored until deliver can be completed.
Tekelec’s Mobile Messaging product family is an innovative, modular approach, which enables operators to deliver advanced messaging without costly network over-engineering or overhaul. Carriers can grow capacity and capabilities incrementally or create a complete, end-to-end SMS solution. When deployed in conjunction with the industry leading EAGLE® 5 platform, mobile operators gain additional SMS offload and flexible routing capabilities – thus optimizing the SMS network.
Applications
Routing
The SMS Router – uses first delivery attempt (FDA) capabilities and rules-based logic to offload SMS traffic from legacy SMSCs, thus enabling a more cost-effective SMS network.
- High performance: 750 short messages per second per node
- Rules-based routing engine: all SMS fields as conditions with field modifications
- Flexible routing paths: supports mobile-to-mobile, mobile-to-application, application-to-mobile and application-to-application
- Throughput regulation: overload protection with fall-back to SS7 and IP destinations
- Full load balancing: weighted, prioritized, and adaptive for SS7 and IP destinations
- Billing: fully configurable including legacy SMSC-compatible formats and prepaid SMS billing interfaces such as CAMEL and DIAMETER
- Statistics: real-time monitoring with user-defined counters via web interface
- Operations and maintenance: SNMP v.1 and via web interface
Security
SMS Firewall - protects networks from hostile spam attacks, including advanced techniques like spoofing.
- SMS screening with high performance: 750 short messages per second per node
- Rules-based filtering for high flexibility to quickly adjust to new
- SMS MO/MT screening from/towards SMSC or mobile
- Advanced anti-spoofing MO/MT to detect and block spoofed and spam messages
- Configurable logging
- Lawful interception to monitor selected users
- Statistics and logging: real-time statistics, web interface, log suspect/blocked messages and user-defined counters
- Operations and maintenance: SNMP v.1 and via web interface
- SMS Firewall Advanced Filters (FAFs) – provides an additional level of security with modular spam filters and advanced verification technology. SMS FAF enables operators to screen and inspect all SMS message types from any network or IP connection
- 500 short messages per second per node
- On-line inspection/screening: virus and spam detection, blacklists and whitelists, and content censoring
- Spam content checking: text normalization, feature generation, anti-phishing, fuzzy logic, UCS2 support, human inspection (manual)
- Offensive language: detect specific words/phrases, replace or mask words
- Anti-flooding: detect advanced flooding, cluster analysis, store/block excess messages
- Statistics and logging: real-time statistics, web interface, log suspect/blocked messages and user-defined counters
- Operations and maintenance: SNMP v.1 and via web interface
Storage
SMS Store - functions as an active storage platform with flexible delivery options that exceed the capabilities of today’s legacy SMSCs. With adaptive delivery schemes, the SMS Store maximizes the use of signaling resources during periods of heavy traffic.
- Adaptive delivery and dedicated retry schemes
- Redundancy: high availability via message replication and geographic redundancy
- High Capacity: 300 short messages per second per node and storage for up to 3 million messages
- Real time queue viewing
- Scheduled delivery
- Operations and maintenance: SNMP v.1 and via web interface
Application Gateway
Application Gateway- flexibility and cost-effectively monitors and controls SMS application traffic.
- High performance: 2,000/4,000 short messages per second per node for 10,000 sessions
- Application interfaces: includes SMPP, UCP and CIMD2
- Rules-based engine provides routing flexibility
- Application originated and terminated routing support
- Throughput control per application or session
- Load balancing: weighted, prioritized, adaptive for IP destinations
- Session and message based traffic management
- Statistics: real-time monitoring with user-defined counters via web interface
- Operations and maintenance: SNMP v.1 and via web interface
Advertising Insertion Center
Advertising Insertion Center – supports sponsored SMS, resulting in increased messaging margins and revenue, while reducing subscriber churn.
- Sponsor text is added to the SMS MT message text and is operator configurable
- Text can be randomly selected from a pool of possible texts, with different sponsors per ad text and/or different texts per sponsor
- Incentive can be offered to users who accept sponsored SMS, for example:
- Receive some free SMS messages
- Discounted SMS for sponsored messages
- Chance to win prize contest
- Subscriber can opt-in / opt-out
Data Management
Statistics - generates real-time data on SMS usage and network performance, which can be delivered to the desktop.
- Real-time SMS statistics (every SMS parameter)
- Live interaction matrix (countries, networks, applications, etc.)
- Marketing information (on-line usage, Top 10’s, etc.)
- Successful and unsuccessful messages, including reasons for failure
- SMS network bottleneck monitoring and analysis tools
- SS7 detailed SMS statistics
Billing
SMS Prepaid Billing Controller (PBC) - enables real-time charging and optional refunds of SMS transactions. It uses transaction logging to provide a complete audit trail and interfaces to virtually any prepaid billing system.
- Real-time charging
- Billing interfaces: including CAMEL and DIAMETER
- Configurable interface
- Rules-based charging
- Subscriber database
- Refund on delivery failure
- High capacity: 500 SMS per second per node
Benefits
- Improved network routing.
Tekelec’s Mobile Messaging solution uses first delivery attempt (FDA) technology, advanced load balancing, throughput controls, and rules-based routing to more efficiently deliver messages to their intended destination. These next-gen messaging capabilities allow operators to leverage their existing SMSCs, or completely re-design their SMS networks to better meet the demands of today’s SMS subscribers
- Advanced network security.
Using the solution’s rules-based filtering and advanced anti-spoofing features, operators can virtually eliminate the delivery of unwanted messages to their subscribers. With the addition of modular filters, even the most advanced spam techniques such as message content and address randomizers, spoofing, flooding, viruses and phishing can be thwarted
- Enhanced network performance and QoS.
Tekelec’s solution presents the actual SMS data visualized per source and destination application, network and country, including successful and erroneous messages. Operators can compare message rates with network performance, identifying bottlenecks and other problems before they become service affecting
- Increased revenues.
Tekelec’s Mobile Messaging product family supports real-time prepaid billing helps reduce the opportunity for fraud, thus improving revenues. Additionally, sponsored SMS creates a whole new revenue opportunity for mobile operators, while allowing them to continue using their existing SMS infrastructure
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