We're now working on a UMA/GAN controller

We've pondered it a couple of times in the past whether we should implement an UMA/GAN controller (UNC/GANC). GAN (formerly called UMA) is a method by which you can tunnel GSM/3GPP Layer3 signalling (Mobility Management, SMS, Call Control) over an IP based bearer such as 802.11 (WiFi).

The idea was that mobile phones that support both a GSM/3G radio as well as WiFi could then simply use WiFi to connect to their mobile operator. This has been deployed around 2007/2008 by some operators such as T-Mobile USA as well as Orange UK. Today it seems that not many operators have caught up and UMA/GAN is mostly a legacy technology, last but not least due to very few phones actually implementing it.

Nonetheless, there are some markets and applications where UMA/GAN is useful. We (Dieter and I) now have managed to secure a contract for an Osmocom implementation based on OpenBSC (and libosmogsm, libosmo-sccp, ...). The beauty is that from L3 up, it is just regular GSM, no change needed at all. Only the transport layer is different: IPsec with TCP + GAN is the bearer, instead of LAPDm/RSL in classic GSM networks.

Another good part unrelated to UMA/GAN is: This will finally force us to clean up the separation between the MSC and BSC part in OsmoNITB (in order to replace the BSC part with the GANC).

Progress has been good so far, the SEGW (IPsec with EAP-SIM) has been configured, and a simplistic start of a GAN protocol implementation gets us through DISCOVERY, REGISTRATION and up to the point where the MS is sending the LOCATION UPDATE message. If you are curious how the protocol actually looks like, I've attached a sample pcap file to the WRTU54G-TM page in the OpenBSC wiki. The source code can be found in the laforge/ganc branch of openbsc.git.