This is the "working page" of the DARWIN project, and it is persistently under construction. The official project page can be found here.

Introduction to the DARWIN project

The project DARWIN+ is carried out at Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien (ftw.) in collaboration with two industry partners, mobilkom austria (the leading mobile operator in Austria, EU) and Kapsch CarrierCom (KCC), and with the Technical University of Vienna (INTHF dept) as academic partner. The project team involves c.ca 6 people between engineers and researchers. The industrial partners contribute 55% of the total budget, while 45% is covered by public funding through the COMET program.

DARWIN+ is based on the achievements of a series of previous project started with METAWIN launched in 2004. The goal of METAWIN was to develop a large-scale monitoring system for the core network of a 3G environment, to deploy it in the operational network of mobilkom austria, and to analyse sample traces in order to gain insight into the traffic network behaviour. The exploration of the traces revealed a number of issues related to performance monitoring, anomaly detection and security aspects in the 3G network. The subsequent projects continued the research started in METAWIN on these issues.

The METAWIN monitoring system

The monitoring system was entirely developed during the METAWIN project as a tool for research in 3G traffic analysis. The METAWIN system can monitor traffic on all the interfaces of the packet-switched core network, for both GPRS and UMTS. Each frame (user packets and signaling messages) is recorded locally along with additional external information (timestamps, originating cell, MS, etc.). Due to privacy requirements the frames are completely anonymized on-the-fly before being stored in memory. All subscriber-related fields at any layer of the 3GPP protocol stack (e.g. IMSI, MSISDN, IMEI) are hashed with a secure non-invertible function, while the user payload at the application layer can be stripped-off, blanked or hashed. An on-line stateful module tracks the current PTIMSI and cell for each Mobile Station (MS), so that each packet can be associated to the originating cell and MS - the latter being identified by local unique tokens since the anonymization process obscures their identity. In order to meet the requirement of on-line anonymization we developed a complete protocol parser for the whole protocol stack of the 3G core network (Gn, IuPS, Gb, ...). Recently the system was extended to monitor the Iub interface in the UTRAN.

The entire system was developed from the scratch within the project, running on the popular open-source operating system Linux. Additional pieces of code have been developed to extract statistics and data out of the raw packet traces. A large-scale deployment of the METAWIN system is now running in the network of mobilkom austria and is used for both production purposes and as a research platform. In parallel to the research project, the METAWIN protype has been consolidated into a commercial carrier-grade product that is commercialized by Kapsch CarrierCom.

People

Project team:

Reference contact persons from partners

Past visiting PhD students

Past members

Papers

The following papers and reports were published based on the research in METAWIN / DARWIN (copyright notice):

Software

Some of the above papers did include measurements of TCP performance indicators (e.g. Spurious Retransmission Time-Outs) that were accomplished by a version of the tcptrace tool modified by Francesco Vacirca. You can find the code here.

Note that this page is persistently under construction



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