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News post draft 2019-11-25 » History » Revision 5

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neels, 11/25/2019 01:28 AM


Distributed GSM / Multicast MS Lookup

When building communal mobile telephony networks in rural areas, traditional
core network infrastructure poses a fundamental challenge: it is built on a
centralised paradigm and requires highly available network links at all times.
Osmocom is currently implementing Distributed GSM (D-GSM), a concept that is a
far better match for a decentralised cooperation of independent communal mobile
networks, who don't have the luxury of ultra-reliable networking infrastructure.

When several communities, who have each built their own independent mobile
network infrastructure, would like to join their services and allow calling,
messaging and Roaming across sites, the usual answer would be a centralised
gateway entity to locate subscribers, and, naturally, a central authority
governing all participating communities. That is a challenge, not only socially
and administratively, but is also quite impractical when the network links
between communities tend to be unstable or expensive.

For example, when a phone has just moved two a different coverage area, but
weather conditions impair the hypothetical wireless link to a central subscriber
database, the phone becomes unreachable, even for callers in the local vicinity
where connecting a voice call would not have posed any problem.

A solution that comes to mind is a series of mirrors of that central database,
one for each site; however, that requires database synchronisation, which in
practice leads to a considerable delay. After a subscriber has moved to a
different coverage area, it can take something like half an hour until a site
notices that a given subscriber has lost reception to its network, and until it
has synchronised that fact with other sites. For that duration, callers are
unable to get the accurate current position of the person they are trying to
reach. Imagine a subscriber located just between two coverage areas, often
switching back and forth between them at random -- service would be disrupted
probably for most of the day.

To solve these challenges, we are implementing D-GSM as part of the Osmocom CNI
stack. D-GSM is a close cooperation with/for Rhizomatica [1], an organization of
community owned operators providing mobile telephony service in numerous rural
communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. We are aiming to overcome common practical
problems that their current mobile networks are experiencing, improving
availability and stability. The results of this work are naturally contributed
to the Osmocom project and are freely available for anyone to use, under terms
of the GNU AGPL. The implementation of D-GSM is mostly funded by the Mozilla
MOSS grant [2], and carried out by sysmocom-employed [3] Osmocom contributors.
Thank you for making this possible!

The solution we are implementing is inspired by the actual social and physical
structure that we aim to service: each village in Oaxaca has their own fully
independent core network stack, and each community is fully in charge of their
own infrastructure. There is no central authority governing across communities,
by deliberate choice. Because the infrastructure is operated in remote rural
areas, often from a pole on a hill crest running on solar panels, and with
directional wifi over large distances, network links between villages can be
unstable.

D-GSM is a quite simple, low impact modification to an Osmocom CNI, which is
designed to match Rhizomatica's situation:

  • it de-centrally resolves the current location of a subscriber (by MSISDN or
    IMSI),
  • provides service addresses to directly reach the subscriber (so far SIP, SMPP
    and GSUP; freely extendable), and
  • it proxies HLR services to provide Roaming across villages.

The key technology that enables D-GSM in Osmocom is called mslookup, which is
built on multicast DNS -- quite similar to the concept of service discovery in
zeroconf networking [4]. Whenever calling or messaging a particular phone number
(MSISDN), a multicast request is dispatched to all connected sites. Each site
where that subscriber has recently been attached replies with the age of the
local record, and the youngest aged response wins. Furthermore, when a
subscriber visits another village and attaches to the local service, mslookup
can find the IMSI's home HLR location and provide Roaming service, proxying to
the remote site's HLR.

By nature of multicast lookups, D-GSM is highly resilient against single sites
or links becoming temporarily unavailable. Service between still reachable sites
simply continues; Service to a disconnected site resumes as soon as it becomes
reachable again. Even adding a new site to the communal network is basically
done by setting up a network link with multicast routing, and by choosing
distinct naming for the local GSUP services.

OsmoHLR is the workhorse for our D-GSM implementation:

  • OsmoHLR answers all service endpoint requests for locally attached
    subscribers, as configured in osmo-hlr.cfg;
  • For IMSIs it doesn't find in the local db (outgoing Roaming), OsmoHLR takes
    care of requesting the home HLR of the IMSI and of proxy-routing HLR
    operations there; and
  • OsmoHLR answers requests for all IMSIs it finds in the local db (incoming
    Roaming).

In fact, no Osmo-Programs' code bases besides OsmoHLR itself need to be touched
for implementing D-GSM. A D-GSM enabled OsmoHLR will soon be available on the
osmo-hlr.git master branch -- the implementation is currently undergoing peer
review to be merged to the master branch.

The elements that request cross-site service for voice and SMS (currently) are:

  • a custom dialplan implementation for a PBX connected to OsmoMSC via
    OsmoSIPConnector (we're using FreeSWITCH [5] in the lab), and
  • a custom SMPP handler connected to OsmoMSC,

both of which are available as example implementations in osmo-hlr.git/contrib/
[6].

This list is likely to be enhanced with further example integrations, like more
FLOSS PBX integrations, or SMS-over-GSUP transport instead of SMPP. That's up to
the Osmocom community to implement and contribute. If you need more information,
take a look at OsmoHLR's user manual [7].

All of the above technology is fully functional in our lab setup right now: we
are routing Location Updating requests, calls, and SMS to the right site,
entirely without the need for centralised administrative infrastructure.

A further aim of D-GSM is providing Roaming service even though the link to the
respective home HLR is unstable or altogether down. The solution is adding a
persistent local cache to the HLR proxy, which we are going to implement next.

D-GSM is, technologically, a relatively trivial enhancement of the Osmocom CNI.
Yet it brings an entirely new paradigm to mobile core network infrastructure: It
allows independent mobile core network stacks to provide voice, SMS and Roaming
services cooperatively, without the need for centralised infrastructure or
administration authority, and is resilient against unstable network links
between sites. It elegantly provides ad-hoc service for subscribers, who are
free to move across all coverage areas, and it allows sites to dynamically join
or leave the cooperative network without the need for configuration changes nor
administrative decisions at other sites.

It also has been and is great fun to implement a versatile enhancement that, for
a change, completely surpasses 3GPP specifications, and has the potential to
change the fundamental shape of communal mobile coverage. We're looking forward
to see D-GSM in action in Oaxaca, soon.

[1] https://www.rhizomatica.org/
[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/moss/
[3] https://www.sysmocom.de/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeroconf#DNS-based_service_discovery
[5] https://freeswitch.org/
[6] Soon on the master branch at
https://git.osmocom.org/osmo-hlr/tree/contrib/dgsm ,
at the time of writing only on the development branch at
https://git.osmocom.org/osmo-hlr/tree/contrib/dgsm?h=neels/dgsm
[7] Soon from the master branch at
https://ftp.osmocom.org/docs/latest/osmohlr-usermanual.pdf ,
at the time of writing only on the development branch at
https://git.osmocom.org/osmo-hlr/tree/doc/manuals/chapters/dgsm.adoc?h=neels/dgsm

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