I am a beginner of erlang，i just know the basic grammer of erlang and simply use erlang to solve easy problems. I want to make further in erlang and now i’d like to use erlang to build a demo about 5G Core Network。So is there open source project suit for beginners to study and is there open source project about 4G/5G core network or similar systems。
I am sorry for my poor English and sincerely hope to get your help.
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Erlang/OTP has it’s roots in telecom, as a product of Ericsson, so unsurprisingly, there have been many telecom projects implemented in Erlang over the years, both commercial and open source.
For example SigScale develops open source protocol stacks (M3UA, TCAP, CAMEL, INAP, MAP, RADIUS) and network elements (OCS, HSS).
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Thanks for your reply, I’ll go look at the projects you mentioned. I want to find out the advantages of using erlang to implement NFs (Network Functions) in the core network compared to other languages such as Go.
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I’m by no means an expert in Erlang/Beam languages - with that disclaimer, the BEAM is a great environment for spawning & handling hundreds/millions of lightweight processes (akim to the “new” virtual threads in java) - as scheduling, running etc of the processes are handled within the BEAM and not the OS.
It seems a natural fit for network applications with a great example being WhatsApp, each socket can map to a process which works independently of other sockets (crashing etc doesn’t affect other sockets/processes).
With the ever improving io_uring in Linux, I expect a great deal of performance again WRT to the BEAM though I’m yet to run any meaningful benchmarks.
Distribution is baked into the BEAM and hence allows for horizontal scaling using cluster of unreliable commodity hardware couch or even more powerful servers.
Vertical scaling/scaling up since the BEAM takes advantage of the available CPU cores.
And a lot more; like supervision etc - IMHO was makes the BEAM great also makes it great for network applications.
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