Hi Harald,
sorry for the late answer (I was on vacation (*)).
However, to put things a bit more into perspective and ensure that this SMSC can also be used in a real GSM core network later on, I would like to ask you to consider staying in line with how the primitives/transacitions look like in a real GSM network.
Agreed. We should use the real world protocols and only simplify by omitting the parts we currently don't need.
Now the desing questions are:
- do you agree that we should align with those primitives?
Yes.
- If yes,is it really worth coding a custom protocol for them, or should we rather already use at least the MAP encoding, but ignore the complex TCAP transaction state machines and SCCP routing? There's already libosmo-asn1-map which should be able to parse and generate the 'real world' data structures. The extra effort is probably limited, and if the messages are then simly sent over a raw TCP (IPA) connection, there is no SS7 complexity.
I am definitely against a custom protocol. Using MAP over raw TCP sounds fine to me.
I will try to find some time to sit down with Peter some time next week to discuss this further.
Regards, -Tobias
(*) ... in a remote location where they did have GSM, but they switched off the BTS during the night to save power ;)