Developing SMS-based Services in erlang

[Miguel Barreiro Paz]

> starting with my final career project.  The project is a proposal for a (mobile)
> telephony service.  Since the beginning of this project I thought of erlang as the
> development environment (I have some experience with ocaml and I got to erlang in a
> functional programming course at the Faculty).

	Funny to know it through the mailing list :-)

> During the first stages of the project we won't be working with any
> telecommunications company, so it'll be ideal to be able to emulate the
> communication network on the lab.  Is it possible to emulate operations such us
> identifying the user (caller), charge the cost of the service to the telephone
> bill...  Does OTP provide such a testing environment?  Is there any other tool for

	I'm not a mobile telecom guy, but there are several GSM network
simulators out there (mostly commercial). Try contacting one of the GSM
operators, they might prove responsive.

On the other hand, if you just need to receive/send SMS, GPRS data, caller
id and such, all you need is a suitable phone :-) (from experience, the
Ericsson T39 is fine and the Linux BlueZ bluetooth stack, IrDA tools,
OBEX, etc work ok with it). A surprising number of not-so-small SMS
services are implemented with serial attached GSM terminals.

	If you really do want to go for the real thing, get ready to chew
some SS7 / SCTP literature :-) At least the people at Corelatus have
implemented an SS7 stack in erlang (and so does Ericsson, I suppose), and
Matthias Läng speech at the EUC2001 implied that it was not exactly a
trivial task.

Regards,

Miguel