32C3 is over, GSM and GPRS was running fine, osmo-iuh progress

The 32C3 GSM Network

32C3 was great from the Osmocom perspective: We could again run our own cellular network at the event in order to perform load testing with real users. We had 7 BTSs running, each with a single TRX. What was new compared to previous years:

  • OsmoPCU is significantly more robust and stable due to the efforts of Jacob Erlbeck at sysmocom. This means that GPRS is now actually still usable in severe overload situations, like 1000 subscribers sharing only very few kilobits. Of course it will be slow, but at least data still passes through as much as that's possible.

  • We were using half-rate traffic channels from day 2 onwards, in order to enhance capacity. Phones supporting AMR-HR would use that, but then there are lots of old phones that only do classic HR (v1). OsmoNITB with internal MNCC handler supports TCH/H with HR and AMR for at least five years, but the particular combination of OsmoBTS + OsmoNITB + lcr (all master branches) was not yet deployed at previous CCC event networks so far.

Being forced to provide classic HR codec actually revealed several bugs in the existing code:

  • OsmoBTS (at least with the sysmoBTS hardware) is using bit ordering that is not compliant to what the spec says on how GSM-HR frames should be put into RTP frames. We didn't realize this so far, as handing frames from one sysmoBTS to another sysmoBTS of course works, as both use the same (wrong) bit ordering.

  • The ETSI reference implementation of the HR codec has lots of global/static variables, and thus doesn't really support running multiple transcoders in parallel. This is however what lcr was trying (and needing) to do, and it of course failed as state from one transcoder instance was leaking into another. The problem is simple, but the solution not so simple. If you want to avoid re-structuring the entire code in very intrusive ways or running one thread per transcoder instance, then the only solution was to basically memcpy() the entire data section of the transcoding library every time you switch the state from one transcoder instance to the other. It's surprisingly difficult to learn the start + size of that data section at runtime in a portable way, though.

Thanks to our resident voice codec expert Sylvain for debugging and fixing the above two problems.

Thanks also to Daniel and Ulli for taking care of the actual logistics of bringing + installing (+ later unmounting) all associated equipment.

Thanks furthermore to Kevin who has been patiently handling the 'Level 2 Support' cases of people with various problems ending up in the GSM room.

It's great that there is a team taking care of those real-world test networks. We learn a lot more about our software under heavy load situations this way.

osmo-iuh progress + talk

I've been focussing basically full day (and night) over the week ahead of Christmas and during Christmas to bring the osmo-iuh code into a state where we could do a end-to-end demo with a regular phone + hNodeB + osmo-hnbgw + osmo-sgsn + openggsn. Unfortunately I only got it up to the point where we do the PDP CONTEXT ACTIVATION on the signalling plane, with no actual user data going back and forth. And then, for strange reasons, I couldn't even demo that at the end of the talk. Well, in either case, the code has made much progress.

The video of the talk can be found at https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7412-running_your_own_3g_3_5g_network#video

meeting friends

The annual CCC congress is always an event where you meet old friends and colleagues. It was great talking to Stefan, Dimitri, Kevin, Nico, Sylvain, Jochen, Sec, Schneider, bunnie and many other hackers. After the event is over, I wish I could continue working together with all those folks the rest of the year, too :/

Some people have been missed dearly. Absence from the CCC congress is not acceptable. You know who you are, if you're reading this ;)