UMTS Protocol Analyzer

Overview

GL’s UMTS analyzer is capable of capturing, decoding and performing various test measurements across various interfaces i.e. Iub, Iur, IuCS and IuPS interfaces of the UMTS network. In addition, it supports ATM as the transport layer. It helps in fault diagnosis and troubleshooting of UMTS network. Multiple instances of UMTS Analyzer can run simultaneously capturing data (real time and off-line) on several T1/E1 lines. The analyzer is also capable of capturing & reassembling frames that were transmitted with Inverse Multiplexing. IMA combines up to 8 T1/ E1 links to form a single high-speed connection with flexible bandwidth options.

GL Communications supports the following types of UMTS analyzers:

Real-time UMTS Analyzer (Pre-requisites: GL’s field proven E1 or T1 internal cards or USB Laptop E1 or T1 external units, required licenses and Windows XP (or higher) Operating System)
Offline UMTS Analyzers(Pre-requisites: Hardware Dongles and Windows XP (or higher) Operating System)

Main Features

Performs numerous measurements across Iub, Iur, IuCS and IuPS interfaces.
Displays Summary, Detail, Hex-dump, Statistics, and Call Trace Views, the contents of this view can also be copied to clipboard.
Summary View provides the information about few important fields (Dev #, Time Slot, VPI/VCI, PT, HEC, OSF, AAL type, CID, AAL type 2 signaling message (ALCAP message) etc and more in a tabular format.
Detail View displays decodes of a user-selected frame from the Summary View.
Statistics View displays statistics based on frame count, byte count, frames/sec, bytes/sec etc for the entire capture data.
Hex dump view displays raw frame data as hexadecimal and ASCII octet dump, the contents of this view can also be copied to clipboard.
Call Trace capability over IuCS and IuPS interfaces.
Search and filtering capabilities for both real-time as well as offline analysis.
Decodes different control plane protocols i.e. NBAP, RNSAP, RANAP, ALCAP, SSCOP etc and user plane protocols i.e. Iu-UP, Iu-FP, AMR etc.
Decode NAS protocols (i.e. CC/MM/SM/SMS/GMM) along with the UTRAN specific protocols.
User can configure VPI/VCI values for PVCs carrying NBAP, RNSAP, RANAP and ALCAP messages to enable decoding of the said protocols.
Ability to configure .ini file for VPI & VCI (for ALCAP, NBAP, RANAP, and so on).
CRC verification for AAL5 carrying packet data.
Capability to export summary view details to comma separated values (CSV) format for subsequent import into a database or spreadsheet.
Capability to export detail decode information to an ASCII.
Any protocol field can be added to the summary view, filtering, and search features providing users more flexibility to monitor required protocol fields.
Remote monitoring capability using GL’s Network Surveillance System.

Additional features supported by real-time UMTS Analyzer

Supports real-time as well as offline analysis.
Recorded raw data can be played back using raw data playback application.
Captures, decodes, filters, and reassembles AAL-2 and AAL-5 frames from within the ATM cells according to user defined VPI/VCI.
Streams may be captured on the selected time slots (contiguous or non-contiguous) and on full bandwidth.
The following variations are accommodated in the software: inverted or non-inverted data, byte reversal or non-reversal, with or without inverse multiplexing in ATM (IMA).
Unscrambling of ATM cells based on SDH X^43 + 1 algorithm.
Multiple streams of UMTS traffic on various T1/E1 channels can be simultaneously decoded with different GUI instances.

Additional features supported by Offline UMTS Analyzer:

Trace files for analysis can be loaded through simple command-line arguments
Multiple trace files can be loaded simultaneously with different GUI instances for offline analysis

Protocols Supported

The list of protocols that are supported by GL’s UMTS analyzer are as given below:

The supported protocol interfaces in UMTS analyzer are Iub-Interface, IuCS/IuPS-Interface, Iur-Interface.

Iub Interface – RNC to Node B interface

ATM (ITU-T I.361)
AAL–5 (ITU-T I.363.5)
AAL–2 (ITU-T I.363.2)
SSCOP (ITU-T Q.2110)
SSCF for UNI (ITU-T Recommendation Q.2130 (07/94))
MTP-3b (ITU-T Q.2210)
ALCAP (ITU-T Q.2630.1)
NBAP (3GPP TS 25.433 V6.3.0 (2004-09))
FP (3GPP TS 25.427 V6.1.0 (2004-12) and 3GPP TS 25.435 V6.1.0 (2004-03))
MAC (3GPP TS 25.321-610)
RLC (3GPP TS 25.322-610
RRC (3GPP 25.331)
MM/GMM/CC/SM ( 3GPP 24.008)
IuPS Interface – The UTRAN interface between RNC and the packet-switched domain of the GSM Phase 2+ CN interface

AAL–5 ((ITU-T I.363.5))
SSCOP (ITU-T Q.2110)
SCCP (Q.713, CCITT (ITU-T) Blue Book / ANSI T1.112-1996)
SCTP (RFC 2960)
GTP–control (GTP–C), GTP–user (GTP–U)
IP (RFC 791)
UDP (RFC 768)
RANAP (3GPP TS 25.413 V6.3.0 (2004-09))
GMM/ SM ( 3GPP 24.008)
IuCS Interface – The UTRAN interface between RNC and the circuit-switched domain of the GSM Phase 2+ CN interface