Design and Implementation of a University-Based Information Service Centre with SMS Notification (Obafemi Awolowo University as a Case Study)

Abstract

Coordination of learners and resources form the basic process in the delivery of education in Universities. The use of mobile computing can be proved to be of immense help in this coordination. This paper presents the description of a suitable software system that can deliver information services with mobile functionality to the content subscriber (student in this case) using Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife (OAU) as a case study. The mobility provided was achieved using Short Message Service (SMS) over Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) Network with the hardware implemented on a GSM Nokia phone acting as a modem. Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) approach with the Unified Modeling Language (UML) was employed to document the software artifacts of the applications. The proposed system was implemented using Java programming language. The software developed integrated subscription, payment and billing, user profile management, efficient mobile architecture, and ease of content publishing, all loosely coupled, to allow for further extension to the service architecture.

Keywords: Information Service Centre, SMS Gateway, GSM modem, Message Tokenizer, JAVA API.