Differences of SMS gateway services : A performance analysis of two communication platforms implemented on an infrastructure based on ASP.NET Core 6

Abstract: Background: When we use our phone to make a purchase, booking, or simply contact someone, we expect a quick response to acknowledge that our request has been sent and received. Today’s traffic requests are higher than ever, and will most likely continue to grow. This puts pressure on the communication platforms to keep up with the demand and continue to perform and deliver the requests within short time frames. Twilio and 46elks are two communication platforms that offer an SMS gateway service, and this thesis will take a deeper look at how they perform when implemented on an ASP.NET Core 6 web application.  Objectives: The goal of this thesis is to evaluate if there are any disparities or similarities between the two communication platform’s SMS gateway services regarding performance. The performance quality attributes are focused on time behaviour, CPU utilization, and RAM usage. Method: Comparing two communication platforms by using a quasi-experiment. A web application was developed with ASP.NET Core 6 to handle incoming SMS bookings. With the provided data from the SMS, it created and stored the booking. Once done, a confirmation SMS was delivered to the Sender. The performance quality attributes were stored and collected for evaluation of each incoming SMS during the experiments. Results: Overall, Twilio had a longer time behaviour and higher RAM usage compared to 46elks, but Twilio had a lower CPU utilization compared to 46elks. Conclusions: The time behaviour and CPU utilization between the two communication platforms were significant different. Interesting findings were that when injecting a higher workload on the web application, the performance improved in two quality attributes, RAM usage and time behaviour, for both communication platforms.