SMSC stands for Short Message Service Center and SMPP stands for Short message peer to peer. The SMSC is center to store the messages sent from one user to another user. The message center delivers the message to the destined address when the user is available and till then, the message gets stored with the center.

The center is responsible to handle all the message operations of the wireless network communication. It creates a route from source to the destination over the network. Every service center has their own SMSC number where the message gets stored. The SMPP is an industry standard protocol designed to exchange the SMS messages between the telecommunication industry and External Short Messaging Entities (ESME). The versions 3.3 and 3.4 of SMPP support the connectivity of SMSC and internet or TCP/IP.

As with the raising standards of the industry, the competition in the market has made it very challenging for the well-established as well as newcomers to keep pace with the changing trends. The changing market trend also suggests that customers have become more intelligent and they only want to invest in the products and services which they actually find valuable and worthy.

So this has increased the challenges for the companies to engage the customers with their products and services. An interesting trick to handle this situation is by maintaining a great customer relationship with prevailing as well as new customers. The easiest way to maintain this relationship is via bulk SMS.

Bulk SMS is a technique that let the companies connect with a large number of users via software in a single click. A system generated message is sent to a large group of people within a fraction of a minute. This is done with the help of SMPP as it connects SMSC to networks.

A million number of messages are delivered in a medium sized network which results in an increment of the network traffic. The SMPP protocol is a TCP/IP based protocol which provides a client/server connection. The protocol is also known to provide an X.25 connection between SMSC and ESME. The External Short Messaging Entities (ESME)can be anything such as E-mail gateway or a voice-mail server. It is very important for an ESME to set up a session with an SMSC to use the SMS services that are offered by the SMPP protocol.

SMPP actually provides three types of sessions that are discussed as follows:

Transmitter (TX)

In this type of the session, ESME is allowed to submit short messages to SMSC. This session is also responsible for querying the status of previously sent delivery to know whether it is submitted successfully or it needs to be replaced or canceled.

Receiver (RX)

In this type of session, an ESME is privileged to receive an SMS message from an SMSC.

Trans-receiver (TRX)

It is a combined session of both previous sessions. This session allows an ESME to send as well as receive the message to and from an SMSC at the same time. As it takes a fraction of second to send or receive a message, so it is very easy to handle both the sessions together.

SMPP sessions are categorized in four operations and these are discussed as follows:

Session management

In this operation, the establishment of the sessions between SMSC and external SME is enabled which also provide the ability to handle the unexpected errors in the sessions.

Message submission

The external SMEs are allowed to submit the messages to the SMSCs in this operation.

Message delivery

The external SMSC SMS are allowed to get submitted to the SMEs in this operation.

Ancillary operations

All the features like querying, cancellation, status checking, message replacement, etc. Are handled in this operation.

SMPP is an asynchronous protocol that provides an encryption mechanism and TLS level security to the messages that reduce the interference of external party to 0%.