Purpose

The purpose of the OpenSS7 project is to attempt to address the following impediments to the widespread use of SS7 both inside and outside the carrier community:

Expense:-

Commercial and bundled SS7 stacks are quite expensive. We have heard reports of stack source code licensing fees approaching $500,000. This cost makes it difficult for consultants, small companies, and researchers to experiment with SS7 and contribute to the procotol, its robustness, and effective reference and product implementations.

The OpenSS7 project's solution to this problem is to make publicly available GPL'ed source code for an SS7 stack available to consultants, small companies and researchers, as well as carriers.

Complexity:-

Commercial SS7 stacks (even some research stacks) tend to be bundled with much larger telecommunications products and packages, and have complex and proprietary redundancy arrangements: making simple applications based on SS7 difficult to develop and integrate.

The OpenSS7 project's solution to this problem is to provide a simple and straightforward implementation of an SS7 stack which is not bound to any specific SS7 application to reduce integration complexity. The OpenSS7 redunancy is based on open architectures and utilized open protocols between processors to further reduce complexity and ease integration.

Collaboration:-

Proprietary SS7 stacks normally have guarded implementation code which is not open to the scrutiny of others. It is our opinion that this leads to a higher number of defects in the resulting implementation due to the reduced number of reviewers who have access to the source code for inspection.

The OpenSS7 project's solution to this problem is to make source code publicly available for scrutiny of as many reviewers as possible, thus, hopefully, leading to a more robust and correct implementation of the specifications.

Certification:-

Until recently, only SS7 implementations which have passed a series of conformance tests and certification processes have been permitted to be connected to an existing SS7 network controlled by an incumbent carrier. Many small companies developing SS7 implementations have been impeded by the high costs associated with attaining and maintaining certification.

The OpenSS7 project does not have a direct solution to this problem. The project has been made `open' in the hope that, by providing a single public implementation, that the cost of certification can be spread across a large number of interested parties and that organizations may be willing to donate the use of laboratory equipment for conformance testing.

Core Competency and Expertise:-

The availability to the core competencies and expertise surrounding SS7, its implementation and applications was traditionally only possible for incumbent carriers. Many of the specifications of SS7 were not publicly available, and can only be purchased (sometimes at significant cost). Furthermore, expertise in the implementation of SS7 stacks and expertise in SS7 applications are two different domains. SS7 applications require domain knowledge in areas not directly related to lower layers of the SS7 protocol.

This has made it difficult for companies and researchers with application domain knowledge to acquire a simple and usable stack upon which to experiment or develop their applications.

The OpenSS7 project's solution to this problem is to provide an SS7 stack with well-defined API abstraction which permit application domain experts to concentrate on their application rather than being concerned with stack implementation or interface nuances. Using the stack is as easy as opening a socket or STREAM, binding it to an SS7 address, and exchanging packets.