Osmocom Review 2017
As 2017 has just concluded, let's have a look at the major events and improvements in the Osmocom Cellular Infrastructure projects (i.e. those projects dealing with building protocol stacks and network elements for mobile network infrastructure.
I've prepared a detailed year 2017 summary at the osmocom.org website, but let me write a bit about the most note-worthy topics here.
NITB Split
Once upon a time, we implemented everything needed to operate a GSM network inside a single process called OsmoNITB. Those days are now gone, and we have separate OsmoBSC, OsmoMSC, OsmoHLR, OsmoSTP processes, which use interfaces that are interoperable with non-Osmocom implementations (which is what some of our users require).
This change is certainly the most significant change in the close-to-10-year history of the project. However, we have tried to make it as non-intrusive as possible, by using default point codes and IP addresses which will make the individual processes magically talk to each other if installed on a single machine.
We've also released a OsmoNITB Migration Guide, as well as our usual set of user manuals in order to help our users.
We'll continue to improve the user experience, to re-introduce some of the features lost in the split, such as the ability to attach names to the subscribers.
Testing
We have osmo-gsm-tester together with the two physical setups at the sysmocom office, which continuously run the latest Osmocom components and test an entire matrix of different BTSs, software configurations and modems. However, this tests at super low load, and it tests only signalling so far, not user plane yet. Hence, coverage is limited.
We also have unit tests as part of the 'make check' process, Jenkins based build verification before merging any patches, as well as integration tests for some of the network elements in TTCN-3. This is much more than we had until 2016, but still by far not enough, as we had just seen at the fall-out from the sub-optimal 34C3 event network.
OsmoCon
2017 also marks the year where we've for the first time organized a user-oriented event. It was a huge success, and we will for sure have another OsmoCon incarnation in 2018 (most likely in May or June). It will not be back-to-back with the developer conference OsmoDevCon this time.
SIGTRAN stack
We have a new SIGTRAN stakc with SUA, M3UA and SCCP as well as OsmoSTP. This has been lacking a long time.
OsmoGGSN
We have converted OpenGGSN into a true member of the Osmocom family, thereby deprecating OpenGGSN which we had earlier adopted and maintained.