Femto Access Point provisioning for Osmocom/Sysmocom

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Mykola Shchetinin mykola at kingmuffin.com
Mon Nov 12 15:25:06 UTC 2018


Hello, dear Osmocom Community and Sysmocom Team!

We are trying out Osmocom software (3G only) to replace the proprietary
software that we are using now. And we like it very much :)

Our femtocells were provisioned with the same proprietary software we
used but now we have to do that ourselves when using Osmocom software.

We have come up with a solution which we wish to share with you and hope
it will come in handy. Also, I am curious about how you handle it. How
do you provision femtocells you have?

We've found this page:
https://osmocom.org/projects/cellular-infrastructure/wiki/Configuring_the_ipaccess_nano3G
But we were unable to follow the procedures described there as they are
outdated (to be precise, they are for outdated firmware).

We use ip.access nano3g femtocells (S8 and S16) which are provisioned by
means of CWMP server (also called ACS - auto configuration server).
(more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069)
The network configuration and an address of ACS for a femtocell to
use are configured through the web page after a factory reset of a
femtocell.

We looked at FreeACS at first (https://github.com/freeacs/freeacs). It
looked quite dead half year ago, but it seems that it is being revived.
Then we looked at GenieACS (https://github.com/genieacs/genieacs) and
managed to make it provision the femtocell.

I did get all CWMP params from the femtocell first by sending
appropriate CWMP messages (getParameterNames, getParameterValues) to the
FAP from the ACS and recording traffic with tcpdump. From the
information I got, I made a configuration file where I changed some
parameters like PLMNID or NTP server addresses to desired values. Then I
wrote a script which read the configuration file and set the params of
the femtocell using functions provided by GenieACS. I configured the
GenieACS to execute the script when getting a request from femtocell.

The sample configuration file and sample scripts are described in a
document-reminder I wrote for myself:
https://gist.github.com/efistokl/b95538772e54e5edb7765021c2b5a745#22-configuring-genieacs-to-use-a-specific-configuration-file

I didn't make it use different configurations for different femtocells
yet. I just made it to allow me to work with Osmocom software and my
femtocell. I wish to improve the usability of this by writing some cli
program to make the configuration process of the femtocell more
automated as we will need to provision multiple femtocells connected to
a single Osmocom system and a single ACS later. (or change the ACS
choice completely)

Thank You for creating and maintaining such a cool software!

Kind regards,
Mykola Shchetinin

P.S. Does anybody have experience using some other ACS/CWMP solution?
Could you share it?



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