SMSC – Setting up Telscale SMSC Gateway on Google Cloud

TelScale SMSC is a robust and carrier proven SMSC built on a modern extensible middleware platform. TelScale SMSC provides core features for mobile subscriber to send SMS messages (over GSM network via SIGTRAN or legacy E1 links), broadcasting campaigns (via SMPP), and group messaging between subscribers.

Telscale SMSC has been deployed on Amazon EC2 HERE. You can also setup Telscale SMSC on Google Cloud.

This tutorial will show how to run Telscale SMSC on Google Cloud

Requirements

Basic Knowledge of Telscale SMSC
Latest Cassandra Database
Google Cloud Compute Engine
Java JDK 7 or higher
Httpd
lksctp for SS7
On a production setup, it is recommended that you have a machine type that runs Quad Core processor with at least 16GB of memory.

Step 1

Log into your Google Cloud Developer’s Console

Create a new instance under Compute ->Compute Engine->New Instance
Modify the following fields
NAME: smsc-test
Allow Http Traffic (checked)
MACHINE TYPE: g1-small
IMAGE: Centos-6xxxx
Leave the rest of the fields as default and press the Create button

The newly created instance should now appear on the list of available instances.

Click on the smsc-test
At the top of the page, click on the SSH tab to reveal the gcutil command to use for SSH connection

gcutil --service_version="v1" --project="telestax-smsc-01" ssh --zone="us-central1-a" "smsc-test"

From your local computer, run the above gcutil command to open a secure SSH connection to your instance.
You must have installed and configured gcutil as explained HERE

Step 2

This is where you must install all the necessary software on your smsc-test cloud server instance.

Cassandra DB

Download Apache Cassandra DB

sudo wget http://mirrors.ucr.ac.cr/apache/cassandra/2.0.9/apache-cassandra-2.0.9-bin.tar.gz

extract content

sudo tar -xf apache-cassandra-2.0.9-bin.tar.gz

Telscale SMSC

Download Telscale SMSC from HERE and extract content of the SMSC zip file

sudo unzip TelScale-smsc-6.1.6-TelScale-SNAPSHOT-1406220037.zip

Java

Download the latest JDK from HERE

curl -b oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie -O -L http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7u60-b19/jre-7u60-linux-x64.rpm

Install the rpm file
```
sudo yum install jre-7u60-linux-x64.rpm
```

Httpd Server

Install and download Httpd
```
sudo yum install httpd
```

Step 3

You must now start Cassandra and create the Telscale SMSC DB.

Go to the Cassandra bin directory /home/charles/apache-cassandra-2.0.9/bin
Start cassandra as a background process
```
sudo ./cassandra -f &
```
Create the TelestaxSMC DB using the cassandra.cql file provided with Telscale SMSC

sudo /home/charles/apache-cassandra-2.0.9/bin/cqlsh -f  /home/charles/TelScale-smsc-6.1.6-TelScale-SNAPSHOT/cassandra/cassandra.cql

To make sure the databases are correctly created, run the cqlsh command and check the keyspaces available

/home/charles/apache-cassandra-2.0.9/bin/cqlsh

Connected to Test Cluster at localhost:9160.
[cqlsh 4.1.1 | Cassandra 2.0.9 | CQL spec 3.1.1 | Thrift protocol 19.39.0]
Use HELP for help.
cqlsh> describe keyspaces;
TelscaleSMSC  system  TelestaxSMSC  system_traces

As you can see above, 2 Cassandra keyspaces TelscaleSMSC and TelestaxSMSC have been created.

Start Telscale SMSC

Go to the bin directory of SMSC /home/charles/TelScale-smsc-6.1.6-TelScale-SNAPSHOT/jboss-5.1.0.GA/bin
Make all shell scripts executable
```
sudo chmod +x *.sh
```
Start the SMSC server as a background service and use -b to bind it to the local IP address of your SMSC server instance
```
../run.sh -b 10.21.30.41 &
```

If the server is successfully started, you should see a message similar to the following:

JBoss (Microcontainer) [5.1.0.GA (build: SVNTag=JBoss_5_1_0_GA date=200905221634)] Started in 3m:13s:880ms

Step 4

Make sure your firewall settings allows ports 8080. You will need to open more port for further testing. See HERE for more details

You can access the management interface of SMSC gateway as follows:

Open your web browser and go to
http://PUBLIC_IP_OF_YOUR_GOOGLE_INSTANCE:8080/smsc-management/

You will see a screenshot similar to the one below

smsc-management-gui

Sending Traffic to the SMSC Gateway

In this section of the tutorial, we are going to use the SMPP simulator tool that comes prepackaged with Telscale SMSC to send some packets to the server. This will populate the Telscale SMSC Casandra DB that was previously created.

On a production, environment, the SMS messages are forwarded to destination through an SS7 connection.

Telscale SMSC comes prepacked with a simulator for basic load testing SMPP. The simulator was configured to send bulk SMPP to the SMSC Gateway server.. You must run the Simulator from a remote computer connecting to the public IP address of the SMSC gateway.

Cd to the directory $TELSCALE_SMSC_ROOT/tools/TelScale-smpp-simulator/bin
$ sudo chmod +x run.sh
The command above will make the file executable
Run the following command to start the SMPP Simulator GUI

sudo $<strong>$TELSCALE_SMSC_ROOT/tools/TelScale-smpp-simulator/bin</strong>/run.s<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br>

1	sudo$<strong>$TELSCALE_SMSC_ROOT/tools/TelScale-smpp-simulator/bin</strong>/run.sh gui

Test Result from Larger Instance

Test scenario

SMPP Client generating traffic
SMPP Server accepting SMS from SMSC
SS7 HLR Simulator and Cassandra were installed and used in the same cloud instance.
Google compute instance running 16 vCPU, 60 GB memory

How many SMS processed per second

Datagram Mode SMPP to SMPP achieved 2500 SMS/Sec
Datagram Mode SMPP to SS7 achieved 1500 SMS/Sec

CPU Usage

During the bulk SMS test, CPU usage was minimal as shown in the screenshot below:

Network Usage

Disk I/O Usage

Wireshark Trace

If you want to see the trace result of the SMPP traffic, you can access the pcap files HERE

Video Tutorial

If you want to learn more about testing Telscale SMSC Gateway, please see the video tutorial below

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