Network interconnection over VPN/SIP

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Neels Hofmeyr nhofmeyr at sysmocom.de
Wed Oct 17 13:06:07 UTC 2018


Hi naif,

your requirements sound a lot alike those that Rhizomatica are solving in
Oaxaca.

Running independent GSM networks is the easy part, the hard part is to connect
them to each other in a failure-tolerant way.

The basic concept is, usually you would have one MSC+HLR for all of your cells,
and calls would easily get routed between the different cells. But if the
connection to the MSC fails, then all is lost. So you want completely separate
network infrastructure for each location. I'm not closely familiar with this
aspect, but I imagine using SIP call routing between the otherwise independent
networks is one solution (think osmo-sip-connector and an external call router
program). The other problem space is that if you want to manage a common
subscriber database (HLR), so that e.g. one SIM (phone) can travel freely
around and use any of the network cells and always be reachable by the same
number wherever it happens to be, then you need some synchronization of the HLR
databases. To illustrate, if I want to be reachable by one given phone number
in all the cells, something has to know which cell to route that number to. If
I show up in a cell, we need to tell the previous cell that I am now over here
instead...  You would have an easier time if each network is managed separately
with its own HLR on-location, in the sense that a SIM card can have a different
phone number in each of them.

I'm making this up as I go, I hope Rhizomatica folks can flesh out some more
details.

Note, we're currently working on improving the network setup for Rhizomatica,
and you're likely to benefit from that, sooner or later.

Either way it would be excellent if you stay in touch and contribute
documentation and/or patches back to Osmocom. Also possible would be to book
support hours from a professional support vendor, if you have some grant that
allows you to, so that your specific needs can be addressed with higher
priority than volunteer work can provide (which would also benefit Osmocom at
large, to pay for maintenance etc.). None of this is required, of course, but
Free Software lives by contribution. All kinds of contribution are welcome.

Looking forward to hearing more about your progress!

~N
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