Abstract

This part of the manual provides information on development of the deployment project, installation and initial configuration of ECSS-10 hardware and software system (hereinafter referred to as ECSS-10, complex or system).

Target audience

The manual is intended for technical personnel performing initial installation and configuration of ECSS-10. The qualification of technical personnel requires basic knowledge of OKS-7, TCP/IP, UDP/IP, SIP, SIP-T, SIGTRAN, MEGACO protocol stacks operation, principles of building Ethernet networks and practical skills of working with UNIX-like OS (Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Red Hat Linux).

Development of the system project

This chapter provides information to start developing a blueprint for a future system. 

The scheme project is executed before installation of the system.

When developing a project diagram, it is necessary to know:

• functional structure of the system: protocols that will be used to connect gateways to ECSS-10; methods for obtaining billing and statistical information;
• set of services provided by the system, in addition to switching telephone calls, level of calculated load on calls with services;
• estimated level of calculated load on the system (number of calls per second in certain directions, total load on the system);
• the required level of system redundancy;
• requirements for providing SORM support.

Based on requirements for the functionality of the system, a list of necessary ECSS subsystems is compiled.

The mandatory components of ECSS are:

• Storage Cluster;
• BUS cluster;
• Core Cluster;
• Mediator cluster.

Depending on the functional requirements, the following components are selected:

• Adapter SIP Cluster,
• Adapter Megaco Cluster,
• Adapter Sigtran cluster.

Based on level of calculated load on the system and redundancy requirements, the following are selected:

• the number and characteristics of hardware resources (processor type, amount of RAM, disk array size, number of network interfaces) on which the system will be deployed;
• topology of cluster distribution on hardware resources (servers) of the system.

Further, with known information about hardware resources and the distribution of clusters on these resources, the network layer of the system is designed. Network addresses are assigned to interfaces, the topology of servers communication between each other is defined based on redundancy requirements.

The final document describing the system should contain the following information, table 1-3.

Table 1 — Hardware system configuration

Table 2 — Network connection topology

Table 3 — Topology of software components

Convenient means of visualizing the information presented above is ECSS block diagram.

Examples of typical solutions are given below.

Example: ECSS structure for certification in TSNIIS?

Table 4 — Hardware system configuration

Table 5 — Network connection topology

Table 6 — Software components topology

Preparing server for system installation

This section describes installation and configuration of Linux Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS operating system, installation and configuration of applications necessary for ECSS-10 operation. Installation of ECSS-10 Softswitch system is given in section ECSS packages installation.

It is necessary to coordinate network interfaces, design network diagram, and prepare a numbering plan beforehand.

At this stage, the servers are being prepared for installation of ECSS-10 software components. Preparation of servers consists of installing operating system with given set of packages and their subsequent configuring.

Software components of ECSS-10 system are cross-platform. Potentially, various operating systems are supported, but at the moment, officially tested and supported OS is Ubuntu Server 18.04 64bit, installation and configuration procedure of which is given below.

System requirements

Actual information on requirements to servers necessary to use ECSS-10 softswitch is given in section Initial system installation without redundancy with one server.

Also, requirements for deploying ECSS-10 on virtual resources:

Minimum requirements for deploying ECSS-10 on virtual resources

For normal operation of up to 1000 subscribers with a load of 20 cps / 120 s duration, at least:

• 8 Gb
• At least 8 high-frequency cores (2.4 GHz and higher) = (4 for MSR, the rest for other services)
• Server operation mode: performance
• HDD: under the condition of minimal logging and disabling traces, at least 50 GB is recommended

Subsections