GL Announces MAPS GPRS Gb Interface Emulator

Speaking to reporters, Mr. Karthik Ramalingam, Senior Manager for product development of the company said, GPRS, or General Packet Radio Service, was introduced (in the late 90's and early 2000's) to enhance data carrying capabilities of the basic GSM Network. Initially it used the conventional T1 E1 transport and frame relay protocol. As data traffic (IP) has steadily increased, the use of IP interface provides many advantages including increased throughput, capacity, and economy. Also as the wireless infrastructure evolves towards IP, the migration of 2G IP based systems to 3G and 4G is also more efficient and economical.



He added, To permit our customers to emulate, test, and verify GPRS Gb functionality, GL has enhanced its MAPS (Message Automation & Protocol Simulation), a multi-protocol, multi-technology platform to emulate GPRS Gb Interface over IP. MAPS also supports many other protocol families including TDM, IP, ATM, and Wireless.



Mr. Ramalingam further added, Besides testing network elements (SGSN and BSS), the tester also involves error tracking, regression testing, and load testing/call generation. MAPS™ GPRS Gb interface Emulator supports various procedures including Network Service Control, Identity Check, Combined GPRS / IMSI Attach, and Routing Area Update. It can run pre-defined test scenarios against the interface test objects in a controlled & deterministic manner.

The emulator also supports powerful utilities like Message Editor, Script Editor, and Profile Editor which allow new scenarios to be created or existing scenarios to be modified as per the supported protocol standards.



Main Features



-Simulates SGSN (Serving GPRS Support Node) and BSS (Base Station Subsystem) elements in GPRS Gb interface over IP

-Simulates Control plane Gb mode

-Generates hundreds of Control Signaling (Load Testing)

-Generates and processes NS (Network Service), BSSGP (Base Station Subsystem GPRS Protocol), and various GPRS session procedure messages

-Supports Gb interface procedures including Network Service Control, Identity Check, Combined GPRS / IMSI Attach, and Routing Area Update

-Insertion of impairments to create invalid messages

-Supports customization of call flows and message templates using Script and Message editors

-Supports scripted call generation and automated call reception

-Script based & protocol independent software architecture

-Provides Call Statistics and Events Status

-Supported on Windows XP and Windows 7 (32 bit and 64 bit) OS



Applications



-Complete analysis and simulation capability

-Provides fault insertion, and erroneous call flows testing capability

-Functional testing, Regression testing and Conformance testing of network elements

-Ready scripts makes testing procedure simpler, less time consuming and hence time to market products

-QoS requests for greater or lesser bandwidth