Industry: Telecommunications | Years: 2018-2020
For a longtime Spindox has been a partner of one of the most important telco operators in Europe. This operator has choosen Spindox for the realisation of Commander, a plugin able to manage a set of open source multiprotocols traffic generators within the framework of 3GPP an IEFT standard adopted in network telecommunication.
If the initial phase of the project started with the coverage of Diameter Protocol, today Commander contains a lot of library of scenarios to support complex campaigns for the management of LTE mobility, VOLTE service and, in general, for the frameworks where protocols find applications.
Today, Commander has been implemented not only in Italy, but also abroad in the customer’s network of United Kingdom, Hungary and Greece.
Need
The project was born from the need to have a tool for the analysis of feasibility, the validation of solutions in pre-production environment, the load and stress test and the troubleshotting of complex scenarios that meet to two preliminary requirements:
- User-friendliness: the tool had to be usable even by those who did not have specific programming and editing skills of particular formats or specialized knowledge about telecommunication protocols.
- Flexibility and speed: the tool had to have a high level of flexibility to realize solutions both in the field of research of errors and in that of simulation in the design phases, as well ass in the next ones of validation of design solutions. The flexibility also had to be combined with the speed in the availability of the solutions requested by the customer.
Solution
The solution created by Spindox is based on web technologies (Node.js, JavaScript) and database NoSQL (MongoDB) and it has been designed with a modular architecture. This choice gives the opportunity of:
- integrate new simulator of protocols and / or interfaces keeping an high grade of scalability;
- have an operative environment that permits the configuration of complex frameworks of simulation, allows their execution and generates the reporting, in a homogeneous way.
The first release of Commander was about the 4g network scenarios of Diameter reporting protocol in the context of mobility management LTE. Subsequently, libraries were developed with scenarios relating to the VOLTE service and to the testing of functions of Diameter Router Agent. At the moment, the libraries Diameter implemented are the following: GX, RX, Sh, CX, S6A, SWx.
The next step of the tool development consisted in the integration of a protocol simulator that supported SIP e SIP-I protocolfor the benefit oftesting activities in context of Mobile Core Network and IMS. Today there are availables also test suites for the Sigtran (IUA, M3UA, V5UA) as well as for the MAP and CAP applicative protocols.
Benefits
There are a lot of benefits for this solution:
- As said before, the tool has a user-friendly interface and can be used intuitively even by those who doesn’t have a programmer backgroung or specific skills of communication protocols.
- There were been used open source technologies for the core, that is an advantegeous choice for the customer in terms of time and investement.
- The solution is scalable and quickly upgradeable: the Commander has a modular architecture, to make immediate the implementation of new scenarios. Furthermore, it adjusts itself promptly to any network evolution as it is easily upgradeable.
- It allows the automatic esecution of not regression test chains (for acceptance, validation and network solution activities).
- It can be installed anywhere with a virtual machine: it can be released in a virtualized environment (cloud) or on a bare metal server with LINUX OS. It is available also as a version on a pen drive.
On going the study for the development of test libraries for the scenarios SRVCC and VoWIFI, and other test libraries based on the following protocols: RTP, H248, RADIUS, S1AP, EPS, HTTP / HTTP2, SMPP, SMTP.
