Maybe, you can get a better idea about what SMSC-Gateway can be used for if I describe how SMSC-Gateway has already been used for more than one year as an experimental alarming system for firemen.
That alarming system consists of a control station which is a proprietary product running under Solaris 2.5 and a machine hosting the server part of SMSC-Gateway including the hardware that is used for the different connections.
The control station knows of types of alarms, alarming groups and resources and uses smscgwc, the client part of SMSC-Gateway, to contact the server part of SMSC-Gateway. Some scripts were necessary to enable the invocation of smscgwc upon firing an alarm via the graphical control station interface. These scripts are taylored to individual needs and are not distributed with SMSC-Gateway.
In case of alarms, the server part of SMSC-Gateway receives so called send requests consisting of a group of recipients and a message text. It then sends SMSes via connections, chosen based on priorities and recipient addresses.
One main advantage of SMSC-Gateway is it's bidirectional communication ability. So, firemen can send answers to alarms, for example if they are on their way or if they are currently unavailable. Those incoming messages are written to a NFS device and can be processed on the control station, for example to figure out if too many alarmed firemen sent negative answers and another alarm needs to be fired in order fill up needed groups.
The web interface that you find in the distribution was developed for this alarming project and should enable the operators at the control station to watch some statistics data and to restart SMSC-Gateway should it come to trouble. This interface is still poor and does not hold what the configuration-button promises - behind it there are only buttons to start, stop or restart SMSC-Gateway.
