Developing SMS-based Services in erlang

[Enrique Marcote Peña]

Hello,

First of all I'd like to thank all the members of the list for their unselfish
effort,  I've been listening here in silent for almost a year and during this
period of time I've collected many notes and references of my  interest.

My name is Enrique Marcote, I'm a computer science student and these days I'm
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).

Besides the development of the service itself (for which I believe erlang is
perfect)  I'm lost with regard to the environment needed to test such an
application.  I've found  at the "Erlang User Conference 2001" the proposal titled
"Welcome SMS in Erlang - Experiences of Rapid Deployment in a GSM  Network" so I
guess that it is possible to write an SMS-based service in  erlang (In the same
conference, some members of my Faculty presented "An  Erlang-based Hierarchical
Distributed VoD System").

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
this purpose?  Does anybody ever put an erlang based application working together
with OPNET?  We've obtain some funds for the development  of this project so we are
also interested on commercial tools (if they're  worthed  and needed).  Thank you
very much.


Regards,

        Quique