A Greedy Approach for Multi-Symbol SMS Message Segmentation

Short message service (SMS) has been a very important tool in mobile communication for years, and the usage is still growing. The difficulty in editing messages on handset devices can be overcome by sending SMS messages through Internet-connected gateways. Furthermore, we can adopt such mechanisms to integrate mobile-computing ability to many existing information systems. However, it’s easy to send a message in which the length of content exceeds the limit allowed by the SMS specification. Therefore, splitting one message into several segments before passing the message to the SMS gateway is necessary if the original message is lengthy. Due to the specification of SMS, the length of a message segment is determined by the content and may vary in different segments. In this paper, we compare two approaches of segmentation. Proof of optimality for the greedy approach proposed in this paper is an open issue for further research.