Welcome SMS

Welcome SMS in Erlang.

Experiences of Rapid Deployment
in a GSM network
The Requirement

 Send out SMS messages to One 2 One customers

when they arrive in a foreign network.
 Don’t send them any more messages for at least two
weeks.
 Different messages depending on destination Country.
 “Marketing” usable GUI configuration.
 Option to send messages to roaming customers when
they arrive in the UK.
 Ultra reliability not a hard requirement
 Except NOT sending multiple messages
The Timescale

 8 (yes, 8) weeks from start of design to launch of

service.
Access to Customer Behaviour?

 Monitor all international c7 signalling links.

 Extract contents of MAP messages:
 Where is the customer? (VLR Address)

 Whose customer is it (IMSI)

 Who should receive the SMS? (MSISDN)

 VLR address and IMSI are in Location Update,

MSISDN is in Insert Subscriber Data. These messages
can even take different physical routes...
Business Logic

 Decide which message to send

 Different depending on class of customer (prepay,
postpay, wholesale)
 Different depending on destination Country

 Different for inbound roamers

 Have we sent them one already in this country?

 Have they elected not to receive these messages
Operational Requirements

 Integrated with existing alarm management system

(SNMP Traps)
 Generate statistic reports of system activity into
existing stats database.
 Load balancing between SMS service centres
 Ability to on the fly reconfigure which SMS service
centres are active and the load balancing between
them.
Design Options

 Commercial c7 probes to do automatic correlation of

all messages for a particular activity.
 Best supplier delivery time longer than entire project
duration.
 Time taken to integrate.. Who knows.

 Option to exercise Synergy across T-Mobile

International group.
 Several useful design ideas shared. Again,
timescales not lined up
 Standard commercial systems - expensive, don’t meet
all requirements, integration time huge
Design Options 2

 Use Erlang?
 But what about c7 probes?

 Possibility to use standard test set (MPA 7400) to

extract all c7 messages as raw data and send out as
UDP
 Two spare (but old) 4 CPU Sun machines about to be
de-commissioned

 Lead times of all elements OK. Now to work...

 Design Overview
SMS Service
Customer Database
Centres
Also Erlang!

TCP (Internal Protocol) TCP (GIP Protocol)

Erlang - A Erlang - B

UDP c7
UDP c7

C7 Probe C7 Probe
 Erlang Nodes
SMS Service Centre

wsms_logic@bruce wsms_logic@burns
sms sms

db_read inets db_read

inets
mnesia
mnesia
Customer dB stats stats
snmp Failover snmp
logic logic

correlator@bruce correlator@burns
Failover
correlator correlator

gn_agent1@bruce gn_agent2@bruce gn_agent1@burns gn_agent2@burns

C7 decode C7 decode C7 decode C7 decode

Bruce Burns
Active Standby
UDP c7 messages
Some screenshots
Some screenshots
Some screenshots
Problems encountered

 Bug with restart of one process starting up too many

sms sending processes.
 LAN Latency - both for UDP and dB reads.
 Fixed by tuning concurrency and timeouts.

 One module not permanently loaded in the customer

Database.
 Scanning an Mnesia table to delete some rows is
pretty heavy..
What else have we been up to?

 Oracle Call Interface Binding to Erlang

 Multithreaded Driver

 Pools of Sessions

 Decent Performance (> 1000 selects per second)

 1500 lines of C (so far!)

 Garbage collection of stale handles

What else have we been up to?

 Oracle Call Interface Binding to Erlang

N = “447956123456”,
F=fun() ->
case oci:exec(“select name, balance from cust where telno = :e”, [N]) of
[{Name, Amount}] ->
A1 = Amount - 10.0,
oci:exec(“update cust set balance = :e where telno = :e”,[A1, N])
[] ->
oci:abort(“Customer not found”)
end,
oci:transaction(Connection, F).
What else have we been up to?

 Generic “behaviour” for tcp/ip clients

 link management (using heartbeats)
 simple callbacks for protocol implementation
 model is all transactions multiplexed down 1 socket
 time taken to implement new protocol down to a few days
 Call Data Record - record and playback
What else have we been up to?

 The Original Project used to justify the use of Erlang

never got into service. All hardware has been re-
deployed for other Erlang applications!