We present a design for policy-based performance management of SMS Systems. The design takes as input the operator’s performance goals, which are expressed as policies that can be adjusted at run-time. In our specific design, an SMS administrator can specify the maximum delay for a message and the maximum percentage of messages that can be postponed during periods of congestion. The system attempts to maximize the overall throughput while adhering to the performance policies. It does so by periodically solving a linear optimization problem that takes as input the policies and traffic statistics and computes a new configuration. We show that the computational cost for solving this problem is low, even for large system configurations. We have evaluated the design through extensive simulations in various scenarios. It has proved effective in achieving the administrator’s performance goals and fast in adapting to changing network conditions. We have also developed a prototype on a comm...