About OpenMSC

OpenMSC is an open source real-time mscgen-based control plane emulator targeted at researchers working with communication networks. In the network management domain - especially Mobile Networks - researchers face the problem that there are no publicly available trace files in order to test their machine learning and pattern discovery algorithms for, e.g., finding network incidents or performing smart and dynamic routing decisions. This leads to publications which use proprietary input data.

OpenMSC addresses this issue by providing a tool to emulate network traces with a high level of customisation. As most data mining algorithms rely on a numeric input format, OpenMSC generates a stream of numeric EventIDs each representing a particular communication between two network elements including protocol type, primitive name, information elements and their values. The EventIDs are generated based on a Message Sequence Chart (MSC) which indicates the sequence of what network entity sends which control plane message to where.

The emulator can be found on Google Code and is licensed under GPLv3.

If you use the emulator for your research, it would be highly appreciated of you reference OpenMSC with the following BibTeX entry:

@misc{Robitzsch2014,
author = {Robitzsch, Sebastian},
title = {{OpenMSC - An Open Source MSCgen-Based Control Plane Trace Emulator for Communication Networks}},
url = {http://openmsc.blogspot.com},
year = {2014}
}

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