Towards a real SIGTRAN/SS7 stack in libosmo-sigtran
In the good old days ever since the late 1980ies - and a surprising amount even still today - telecom signaling traffic is still carried over circuit-switched SS7 with its TDM lines as physical layer, and not an IP/Ethernet based transport.
When Holger first created OsmoBSC, the BSC-only version of OpenBSC some 7-8 years ago, he needed to implement a minimal subset of SCCP wrapped in TCP called SCCP Lite. This was due to the simple fact that the MSC to which it should operate implemented this non-standard protocol stacking that was developed + deployed before the IETF SIGTRAN WG specified M3UA or SUA came around. But even after those were specified in 2004, the 3GPP didn't specify how to carry A over IP in a standard way until the end of 2008, when a first A interface over IP study was released.
As time passese, more modern MSCs of course still implement classic circuit-switched SS7, but appear to have dropped SCCPlite in favor of real AoIP as specified by 3GPP meanwhile. So it's time to add this to the osmocom universe and OsmoBSC.
A couple of years ago (2010-2013) implemented both classic SS7 (MTP2/MTP3/SCCP) as well as SIGTRAN stackings (M2PA/M2UA/M3UA/SUA in Erlang. The result has been used in some production deployments, but only with a relatively limited feature set. Unfortunately, this code has nto received any contributions in the time since, and I have to say that as an open source community project, it has failed. Also, while Erlang might be fine for core network equipment, running it on a BSC really is overkill. Keep in miond that we often run OpenBSC on really small ARM926EJS based embedded systems, much more resource constrained than any single smartphone during the late decade.
In the meantime (2015/2016) we also implemented some minimal SUA support for interfacing with UMTS femto/small cells via Iuh (see OsmoHNBGW).
So in order to proceed to implement the required SCCP-over-M3UA-over-SCTP stacking, I originally thought well, take Holgers old SCCP code, remove it from the IPA multiplex below, stack it on top of a new M3UA codebase that is copied partially from SUA.
However, this falls short of the goals in several ways:
The application shouldn't care whether it runs on top of SUA or SCCP, it should use a unified interface towards the SCCP Provider. OsmoHNBGW and the SUA code already introduce such an interface baed on the SCCP-User-SAP implemented using Osmocom primitives (osmo_prim). However, the old OsmoBSC/SCCPlite code doesn't have such abstraction.
The code should be modular and reusable for other SIGTRAN stackings as required in the future
So I found myself sketching out what needs to be done and I ended up pretty much with a re-implementation of large parts. Not quite fun, but definitely worth it.
The strategy is:
Implement the SCCP SCOC state machines for connection-oriented SCCP (of which Iu and A interface are probably the only users) using Osmcoom Finite State Machines (osmo_fsm).
Migrate the existing SUA code on top of that, maintaining the existing osmo_prim based SCCP User SAP
Implement SCCP to SUA and vice-versa message transcoding to makes sure the bulk of the code has to deal only with one message format (parsed SUA).
Introduce a MTP SAP at the lower boundary of the SCCP code
Implement xUA ASP and AS statemachines using osmo_fsm and add ASPTM/ASPSM support to SUA (was missing so far) * Implement
Implement M3UA using the xUA ASP and AS FSMs as well as the general xUA message encoder/decoder, offering the MTP SAP toward SCCP
And then finally stack all those bits on top of each other, rendering a fairly clean and modern implementation that can be used with the IuCS of the virtually unmodified OsmmoHNBGW, OsmoCSCN and OsmoSGSN for testing.
Next steps in the direction of the AoIP are:
Implementation of the MTP-SAP based on the IPA transport
Binding the new SCCP code on top of that
Converting OsmoBSC code base to use the SCCP-User-SAP for its signaling connection
From that point onwards, OsmoBSC doesn't care anymore whether it transports the BSSAP/BSSMAP messages of the A interface over SCCP/IPA/TCP/IP (SCCPlite) SCCP/M3UA/SCTP/IP (3GPP AoIP), or even something like SUA/SCTP/IP.
However, the 3GPP AoIP specs (unlike SCCPlite) actually modify the BSSAP/BSSMAP payload. Rather than using Circuit Identifier Codes and then mapping the CICs to UDP ports based on some secret conventions, they actually encapsulate the IP address and UDP port information for the RTP streams. This is of course the cleaner and more flexible approach, but it means we'll have to do some further changes inside the actual BSC code to accommodate this.