Support #3158: OpenBTS with OsmocomProjects ? - Cellular Network Infrastructure - Open Source Mobile Communications

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Support #3158

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OpenBTS with OsmocomProjects ?

Added by Endast about 6 years ago. Updated over 5 years ago.

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Closed

Priority:

Low

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Start date:

04/12/2018

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Description

Hello,

I'm currently setting up an almost entire basic mobile network with the Osmocom projects. My lab have some OpenBTS hardware and I was wondering if it's possible to interface OsmoBSC and OpenBTS ?

I already read an article on Osmocom website talking about these two projects and making a comparison between them and indeed, the two approaches are completely different but maybe is it possible to use only the hardware part of OpenBts ?

Have anyone already tried a similar thing ?

Thank you for your answers,
Kind Regards,
Vincent

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Updated by laforge about 6 years ago

On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 05:41:59AM +0000, Endast [REDMINE] wrote:

I'm currently setting up an almost entire basic mobile network with the Osmocom projects. My lab have some OpenBTS hardware and I was wondering if it's possible to interface OsmoBSC and OpenBTS ?

Can you be more specific as to what "some OpenBTS hardware" is? OpenBTS is software, and it runs on a variety of hardware, starting from a clasic USRP up to virtually any UHD-supported SDR.

Have anyone already tried a similar thing ?

Most SDR hardware supported by the OsmoBTS Transceiver program should 1:1 be supported by
OsmoTRX. If your particular device is not, there are two methods of approaching this:

a) using the OsmoBTS Transceiver with that hardware and making it talk
to osmo-bts-trx (the UDP based protocol should be the same, or very
close)

b) porting support for that specific SDR hardware into OsmoTRX.

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Updated by Endast almost 6 years ago

Hello,

Sorry for the long delay. Time was necessary to take the hardware, to set it up etc...

So I will try to be as clear as possible :

I'm configuring a very basic mobile network with : Osmo-Hlr, osmo-msc, osmo-stp, osmo-bsc
My lab have a commercial hardware from Range Network with OpenBTS software (almost ready to run with basic configuration), the reference equipment is 5150-001.

As we have to simulate a real network simulator (so with the real equipment such as MSC and HLR), I'm wondering if it's possible to use only the antennas of the 5150 range network to spread my cell network and so the BTS, BSC, MSC etc functions will be organized by the different Osmocom projects. So in my mind, I don't need the openBts software (neither the smqueue, asterisk etc...).

For this I found this link : https://osmocom.org/projects/osmotrx/wiki/OsmoTRX which mentions OpenBTS.
As it's not very clear, can you confirm (in your point of view) that I need OsmoBts and OsmoTRX as well to do that ?

Thank you for your answer

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Updated by laforge almost 6 years ago

The combination of hardware and software you are using has - to the best of our knowledge - so far not been used by anyone so far.

The Osmocom stack has an extensive list of BTS and SDR hardware from many manufacturers that it supports, ranging from Siemens, Nokia, Ericsson, ip.access, sysmocom, Nutaq, Octasic, and many others for full BTS products, as well as UmTRX, Ettus USRP and other UHD-supported devices as SDR hardware.

The Range Networks radio you are describing is not in this list.

Technoligically, it should not be very complicated to support, it's just a combination that nobody has yet invested the time/efford/funding in to get it supported. See my previous response on the two different possible approaches to go about this.

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Updated by Endast almost 6 years ago

OK thank you for your answer.

According to the first approach, that would mean that I have to install OsmoTRX on that hardware right ? And so this OsmoTRX on RangeNetwork will talk to the OmosBTS-TRX on my computer.

Sorry for this basic question, i'm quite lost between the different names.

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Updated by laforge almost 6 years ago

Priority changed from Normal to Low

Endast wrote:

According to the first approach, that would mean that I have to install OsmoTRX on that hardware right ? And so this OsmoTRX on RangeNetwork will talk to the OmosBTS-TRX on my computer.

yes, this is a correct description of the first approach.

The difficultiy is not installing the software. The task that needs to be started with is porting the OsmoTRX software to a new radio hardware that it doesn't support so far.

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