Lucent Worldwide Services

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Camel Gateway solution

The challenge

Lucent was contracted by a consortium of mobile operators to deliver a custom-built Camel Gateway and protocol converter within very ambitious timescales.

The solution was necessary to enable members of the consortium to handle high volumes of SS7 messages passing between Mobile Switch Centres (MSC) and the billing system.

Although Lucent had selected a suitable hardware platform and high-performance SS7 stack, the project timescales needed to create the custom software needed represented a key area of risk.

The solution

Lucent turned for assistance to its trusted software partner, IPL. Having worked with IPL on many previous developments involving SS7 platforms, Lucent knew it could depend on IPL's expertise and professionalism in this specialist domain.

To start, IPL consultants worked with Lucent architects to document the customer's detailed systems requirements. Upon sign-off, the Lucent project manager then rapidly assembled a team of developers, including a number of key IPL staff.

IPL played an important role designing and coding the Service Control Point (SCP) – that is, everything from the SS7 stack up to the TCP/IP interface into the billing system.

This included a Camel message decoder, the service logic and its execution environment, and a message generator for the billing system organized around IMSI ranges. IPL also developed various management functions including timer routines, statistics handler and an alarm/error condition handler.

The highlights

By bringing IPL into the project from ‘day one’ and by entrusting IPL with some critical components of the development, Lucent were able to successfully deliver and commission the solution on time and within budget.

Furthermore, the efficiency of IPL's code has resulted in the 4-CPU fault tolerant Intel Xeon platform working very comfortably within its rated load-sharing capacity.

IPL has again demonstrated its ability to integrate seamlessly with its clients' teams, and its superb ability to deliver complex technical solutions that work every time.

The result is that Lucent now has a key reference customer in a particularly dynamic segment of the European mobile market, and an excellent opportunity for further sales to other partners within the consortium.