Deeper ventures into Ericsson (Packet) Abis

Some topics keep coming back, even a number of years after first having worked on them. And then you start to search online using your favorite search engine - and find your old posts on that subject are the most comprehensive publicly available information on the subject ;)

Back in 2011, I was working on some very basic support for Ericsson RBS2xxx GSM BTSs in OpenBSC. The major part of this was to find out the weird dynamic detection of the signalling timeslot, as well as the fully non-standard OM2000 protocol for OML. Once it reached the state of a 'proof-of-concept', work at this ceased and remained in a state where still lots of manual steps were involved in BTS bring-up.

I've recently picked this topic up again, resulting in some work-in-progress code in http://git.osmocom.org/openbsc/log/?h=laforge/om2000-fsm

Beyond classic E1 based A-bis support, I've also been looking (again) at Ericsson Packet Abis. Packet Abis is their understanding of Abis over IP. However, it is - again - much further from the 3GPP specifications than what we're used to in the Osmocom universe. Abis/IP as we know consists of:

  • RSL and OML over TCP (inside an IPA multiplex)

  • RTP streams for the user plane (voice)

  • Gb over IP (NS over UDP/IP), as te PCU is in the BTS.

In the Ericsson world, they decided to taka a much lower-layer approach and decided to

  • start with L2TP over IP (not the L2TP over UDP that many people know from VPNs)

  • use the IETF-standardized Pseudowire type for HDLC but use a frame format in violation of the IETF RFCs

  • Talk LAPD over L2TP for RSL and OML

  • Invent a new frame format for voice codec frames called TFP and feed that over L2TP

  • Invent a new frame format for the PCU-CCU communication called P-GSL and feed that over L2TP

I'm not yet sure if we want to fully support that protocol stack from OpenBSC and related projects, but in any case I've extende wireshark to decode such protocol traces properly by

  • Extending the L2TP dissector with Ericsson specific AVPs

  • Improving my earlier pakcet-ehdlc.c with better understanding of the protocol

  • Implementing a new TFP dissector from scratch

  • Implementing a new P-GSL dissector from scratch

The resulting work can be found at http://git.osmocom.org/wireshark/log/?h=laforge/ericsson-packet-abis in case anyone is interested. I've mostly been working with protocol traces from RBS2409 so far, and they are decoded quite nicely for RSL, OML, Voice and Packet data. As far as I know, the format of the STN / SIU of other BTS models is identical.

Is anyone out there in possession of Ericsson RBS2xxx RBSs interested in collboration on either a Packet Abis implementation, or an inteface of the E1 or packet based CCU-PCU interface to OsmoPCU?