Patent ID: 8170590

Claim:
A method for forking transmission of Short Message Service (SMS), comprising: receiving, by an IP-Short-Message-Gateway (IP-SM-GW), an SMS message; constructing a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) message in which the SMS message is encapsulated or which carries the content of the SMS message and which carries a forking indication indicating whether forking is to be employed; sending the SIP message to a Service-Call Session Control Function, S-CSCF, in an IP Multimedia Subsystems, IMS, network; and determining, by the S-CSCF, whether forking is to be employed according to the forking indication in the received SIP message; and if the S-CSCF determines that forking is to be employed, determining, by the S-CSCF, the information of user terminals corresponding to a public user identifier carried in the SIP message according to pre-set correspondence between the public user identifier and the information of more than one user terminal; and sending the SIP message to the user terminals corresponding to the information of user terminals, wherein the SIP message further comprises a forking mode indication which indicates the forking mode to be employed by the S-CSCF, and the constructing the SIP message comprises: determining, by the IP-SM-GW, according to pre-set correspondence between a forking mode and Circuit Switched (CS) domain identifications of destination user terminals which are adapted to receive the SMS message, the forking mode indication for the CS domain identifications of the destination user terminals, constructing the SIP message in which the SMS message is encapsulated or which carries the content of the SMS message and which carries the forking mode indication.