Thursday, February 18, 2010

3GPP Specs

As we know there are hundreds of 3GPP specs. But when coming to the implementation will all that is written in the spec will be implemented. Of-course not. I think the specs give an detailed view of the architecture and how things should work . But there are some many things that are outside the specifications scope and mind you they can happen in the real world.

Ambiguous scenarios, negative scenarios, collision scenarios and what not. When coming to LTE I pity eNB and MME. They are most vulnerable to take a beating from various handsets. More over the interpretation of specifications from one engineer to other may be different, so the product might seem different. Hence IOTs are needed.

The wireless world is so different from the regular networking at Layer 2 and Layer 3. The IEEE standards and RFCs are clearly written, so the implementation is very clear. The thing to notice here is there are not many end user to it. Who would be running BGP or OSPF or MPLS? Most of the traffic in the internet is at Layer 7 and hence I feel difficulty is a bit less in internet. But I do agree at there are very complex protocols involved in the internet. But in wireless, the whole network is at the customers stake. A fake UE can bring down the back-end devices. So the equipment manufactures do implement lot of things that are outside the scope of the 3GPP specs. Just a thought.

2 comments:

Sripada Kamesh said...

The thing here is whenever we talk about the negative/error scenarios, there can be many more which we can not think of. But we can come to know about them during IOTs. Even IEEE or RFCs are also not clear about the negative scenarios. In fact no standard body clearly says about the -ve scenarios. Only +ve scenarios are well defined. Sometimes these -ve scenarios will be implemented based on the mutual discussion with MS/BS vendors. Otherwise the job of standard bodies will become truly difficult.. :-)

Anonymous said...

It is really challenging with multi-vendor networks (HSS, eNodeBs, MME, SGW, PDNGW). Aligning vendor releases to common TS and CR levels is a nightmare.