Recommended reading:
If you wish to protect your service against hardware failure and reach higher
availability of your Ozeki NG SMS Gateway software, we recommend you to try
our Ozeki Cluster software product.
Ozeki Cluster automatically moves any
service to another computer in case of a hardware failure. You can
download it from:
Ozeki Cluster Site
This page explains how the load balancing feature
of the Ozeki NG - SMS gateway software allows you to join a transmitter
and a receiver connection from a GSM/CDMA service provider. You can learn
why this solution is convenient in SMS messaging, and how to achieve it.
It may occur that 2-way SMS services require you to set up
two Short Message Peer to Peer (SMPP) connections with a GSM/CDMA service
provider: one for sending and one for receiving SMS messages (Figure 1).
Setting up two connections
Figure 1 - Setting two connections
For instance, if a GSM/CDMA service provider uses the 3.3
version of the SMPP protocol, one of the
connections will operate with "transmitter", while the other with "receiver"
settings. The transmitter connection can only be used to send messages, while
the receiver connection can only be used to receive messages. This specification
of a connection is called bind mode. It defines whether a connection is
bound (used only) as a transmitter or as a receiver. It also defines
whether the messages sent using the connection are inbound or
outbound.
You can set the bind mode in the connection tab of the SMPP Configuration panel
(Figure 2-3).
Connection #1 - configure as transmitter
Figure 2 - Setting the bind mode
Connection #2 - configure as receiver
Figure 3 - Setting the bind mode
The situation in which you have two connections with a
GSM/CDMA service provider is depicted in Figure 4 below.
Figure 4 - A transmitter and a receiver connection with the same service provider
However, this setup may be inconvenient when configuring
the routing of messages. (For more information about routing, check out the
Inbound Routing
and the Outbound Routing page.)
With this setup you need separate routing rules for both the
transmitter and the receiver connection to involve them in SMS messaging
with different users and applications. Therefore, you may be motivated to
find a solution to simplify this setup.
The load balancing feature of Ozeki NG - SMS Gateway
allows you to handle such connections. This feature is a
capability of the program to join two different connections and to make them
act as if they were one and the same connection. You can read about another
example of this on the Load Balancing page.
To join a transmitter and a receiver connection, you have
to give them the same (service provider connection) name when installing and
configuring them.
To find out how to install and configure a service provider connection,
visit the Service Providers page.
Accordingly, instead of naming e.g. the transmitter
connection "Vodafone1" and the receiver connection "Vodafone2", name each of
them "Vodafone".
Also, specify "Vodafone" in both the inbound and the outbound routing table.
Then, the inbound and the outbound routing tables may look like the ones
in Figure 5 below.
Figure 5 - Two connections referred to with the same name
This identical name provides enough information for the engine
to "know" which of the two connections is meant when identifying a service
provider connection for inbound or outbound routing.