Routing messages in a telecommunications network to machine-to-machine devices

摘要

Machine-to-machine (M2M) devices are able to communicate over a telecommunications network with a mobile device (e.g. a smartphone) using a SIM card. However, as M2M devices typically communicate infrequently it may be wasteful to allocate a SIM with a dedicated MSISDN to a M2M device. A method is described where a user can send an SMS (or USSD) message which is not able to be directly routed to an M2M device. The message is diverted by the telecommunication network to a management server where it is adapted to be routable to the M2M device and subsequently returned to the telecommunications network for receipt by the M2M device. This may be facilitated by a pairing process within the management server which pairs individual M2M devices to user devices. In this way, on receiving a message from a user the management server is able to adapt and transmit the message to the corresponding paired M2M device.