Software updates for the sysmoBTS

Every significant piece of software may contain defects that might lead to failure and our software is no exception. The fundamental difference between other vendors of GSM equipment and us is how we deal with them and learn from them.

The sourcecode of our software is maintained in publicly accessible git repositories. Everyone has access to all the sourcecode and tools. Customers will be able to explore the sourcecode and see if we have resolved the underlying error or just applied a band aid for the specific problem that was being reported. On top of that we are constantly improving our test coverage on all pieces of our software stack. Our tests and their results are publicly available as well.

In the last weeks we have worked to improve the reliability of the BTS software under very high load and improved the BTS manual to explain how to tune for extremely high load. Parts of the tests was a manual simulation of a RACH DoS that we can trigger from our BSC/NITB solution. This will attempt to allocate all logical channels and immediately re-allocate them when they are closed due to a link failure. During these tests, we have noticed some minor memory leaks and have resolved them as well. Currently there are no known reliability issues with the BTS software.

We have updated our testing repositories with new builds of the BTS software and will merge these packages into the stable repository in the coming weeks.