SMS (Short Message Service) is specified by the ETSI (standards GSM 03.40 and 03.38). It can contain up to 160 characters, where each character is written according to the7-bits GSM default alphabet.[ 7 bits default table ]
SMS also contains some meta-data, e.g.
Info about the senders ( Service center number, sender number)
Protocol information (Protocol identifier, Data coding scheme)
Timestamp
There are 2 ways to receive and send SMS messages , PDU (protocol discription unit) and Text mode. In this document we focus on PDU mode.
PDU format can be used on any encoding.
As an example: 07911326040000F0040B911346610089F600002080629 17314080CC8F71D14969741F977FD07
The above PDU string contains the message "How are you?" and was read from a jindi gsm modem.The string is built from hexadecimal-octets and semi decimal-octets.As mentioned, SMS contains metadata about itself. We explain it using the example above: