5441336585

1 Introduction

Master’s Thesis at UU Supervisor: Lars Kari Rewiever: Olle Gallmo Document written in I^I^X

1.1    Intro

To enable the services that are provided by mobile phone networks, a whole set of network elements are defined by various standards (see 1.4). Some elements are nodes responsible for charging the subscribers based on their payment plans, other for assigning parts of the radio bandwidth to the con-nection between phone and radio masts, some for forwarding short messages between subscribers and so on, the list is long (how the network is built is briefly introduced in 2.2).

One of these nodes, the Home Location Register or HLR, is responsible for keeping track of the subscriber data, with data such as phone number, cali forwarding information and, among other things, the physical location of the mobile phone. You can read morę about this node in section 2.2.1.

For a regular mobile phone, many of these services can be very useful and many subscribers are using many of them, but for some applications there is no need to use all of the services. Consider, for example, soda-vending machines, which are situated throughout flight terminals, schools and public spaces. Once deployed, they will not move around, so there is no need to update the location of them, they will never make calls but some of them are capable of sending text messages to their suppliers saying they need to be refilled or emptied. They have no need for the capabilities of a fuli scalę HLR implementation with services such as calls. For applications like these, being able to send SMS (see 2.3) is enough.

This is a scenario in which a lightweight HLR capable of SMS would be useful. This thesis will explore how to design, how to implement and how to test such a HLR.

1.2    Research Questions

The aim is to implement a fully working HLR-prototype that can be:

1.    used as real-world applications in industry

2.    configured and maintained in a simple an easy way (compared to a conventional HLR)

The implementation is done in the programming language Erlang and using the database that is delivered with Erlang, Mnesia. For morę info see

7