Hi lists!
It's no secret for everyone, that today OsmocomBB is not actively maintained
as well as OpenBSC, for example. I think it's mostly due to supported
hardware
limitations. Currently supported platforms is still a bit of 'black box'.
Moreover every day it's harder to find and buy a new one.
Fortunately, there are many SDR platforms available now. Especially
interesting
devices are USRP, UmTRX, bladeRF, and recently introduced LimeSDR. They can
be
easily programmed to support just about any type of wireless standard, of
course,
including some mobile telecommunication stacks. As well as for network side
back-end,
they can be used to perform MS side operations, excepting frequency-hopping
and some
phone specific features (like SIM I/O).
So, I think there is a way to bring a new live to, amazing child of the
Osmocom
umbrella, OsmocomBB. We can make one work on SDR hardware platforms
implementing
a 'bridge' between both already implemented L2/L3 and OsmoTRX. I know that
there
already was some attempts (see sylvain/ms-sdr branch) to make described
dreams
come true, but development was stopped. And now I am going to start to work
around
this direction.
What for?
- GPRS and EDGE support
- More flexible voice routing
- Multi SIM support
- Next generation networks support (UMTS, LTE)
- ...
Currently I am looking for developers interested in this subject. So, any
ideas
and contributions are welcome! Together we can realize all the things
faster and
create a new area of research and development. Also for me it's very
important to
know opinions of Osmocom community members and exactly OsmocomBB
founders/developers.
Thanks!
С наилучшими пожеланиями,
Яницкий Вадим.