The Short Message Peer to Peer (SMPP) protocol is an open, industry standard protocol designed to provide a flexible data communications interface to transfer short messages between the Message Center and a SMS application system. Examples of Message Center are Short Message Service Centro (SMSC), GSM Unstructured Supplementary Services Data (USSD) Server . Examples of SMS application system are WAP Proxy Server, Email Gateway or other Messaging Gateway.

The AntHill SMPP (Cpp,Ruby) project is a powerful networking library that implements SMPP protocol (v 3.4 and v 5.0) and supply different fail-over and scaling functionality. It is based on AntHill library. The library contains SMPP Encoder and Decoder as well as other utilities like SMPP DumpViewer, SMPP SMSCEmulator, SMPP Shell and etc.