CoLTE is the Community LTE Project. It is designed to be an all-in-one turnkey solution that sets up a small-scale locally-run LTE network. CoLTE consists of several main elements working together:

1. An all-in-one software EPC powered by OpenAirInterface (OAI).
2. Network monitoring software (powered by haulage) that keeps track of how many bytes each user uses and takes action at certain thresholds.
3. A Web GUI that lets users check the status of their account, top up, transfer/resell credit, and buy data packages.
4. Local Web and DNS serving/caching via Nginx and BIND.
5. Locally-hosted web services that include Rocketchat, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMaps, a media server, and more.

Currently we support and test Debian 9 (stretch) and Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic).

Starting with Release 0.9.2, we've switched over to using .deb packages for Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic) and Debian 9 (stretch). To add our apt repository and clone them, use the following commands:

echo "deb http://colte.cs.washington.edu $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/colte.list
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/colte.gpg http://colte.cs.washington.edu/keyring.gpg
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install colte

The colte package is a meta-package consisting of colte-epc and colte-webgui. colte-epc consists of four packages: colte-hss, colte-mme, colte-spgw, and colte-db. These packages come with a default database configuration that lets you start and operate every component; after installation you still will have to configure CoLTE to do what you want. After installation, the webgui will be automatically listening on http://localhost:7999; the other components can be started with sudo {oai_hss | mme | spgw} or sudo systemctl start {oai_hss | mme | spgw | colte-webgui}.

Our "master" branch should always compile, but is updated frequently with small feature-adds. For maximum stability, we recommend cloning the most recently tagged release (which usually corresponds to the latest apt-get version above). Once cloned, you can install the basic colte package by running ./system_setup/install.sh basic_install.

All configurable options can be found in /usr/local/etc/colte/config.yml. After you edit any of these options, you must run colteconf update to reconfigure all components. colteconf prompt provides an interactive configuration utility to help, but you can also edit config.yml directly. Note that you must run colteconf at least once after installing CoLTE, because there is no way for us to pre-set some of the default options (e.g. upstream and downstream interfaces).

Your machine will need two network connections: one to the Internet (the upstream WAN) and another to the eNodeB (the downstream LAN). These can be set to the same interface, it doesn't matter. Both of these connections must be already configured with IP addresses (doesn't matter if Static or Dynamic) and must be up. Note that if the LAN interface is down, you won't be able to start the MME, and if the WAN interface is down, you won't be able to start the SPGW.

Set wan_iface to your upstream (Internet) interface, enb_iface to the downstream LAN interface, and enb_iface_addr to the downstream interface's address/subnet. Don't worry about matching lte_subnet to any value in particular, because this subnet is created and assigned to the virtual gtp0 interface once the SPGW brings it up. Finally, network_name lets you give your network a specific name for serving DNS entries (e.g. if it's set to "seattle" then connected phones can access the webgui under "http://network.seattle".

The EPC has three separate components: the hss, mme, and spgw. I recommend starting them in that order. Once installed, you can start or stop each component by typing the following command in a terminal window:

sudo {oai_hss|mme|spgw}

With each new connected component, you should see them log some startup messages, connect to the other components, and then go quiet, except for the MME, which prints out a status update every ten seconds.

We also provide systemd integration. You can start any of these operations as a service, and read the output in journalctl, with the following commands:

sudo systemctl start colte-{hss|mme|spgw}
sudo journalctl -f -u colte-{hss|mme|spgw}

The WebGUI is started automatically after installation. You can start/stop it with:

sudo systemctl {start|stop} colte_webgui

If you want/need to change any configuration files (for the core or other services) after installation, you can find them all in /usr/local/etc/colte. After changing any files, you will have to restart the corresponding service(s). Correspondingly, all logfiles can be found in /var/log/colte or with journalctl.

There are a bunch of different Web-based services exposed on this machine. Here's an authoritative list of the different services that are exposed, and what port they're assigned to by default.

1. phpMyAdmin: http://localhost/phpmyadmin
2. ntopng: http://localhost:3002/
3. Node Webgui: http://localhost:7999/
4. Emergency Homepage: http://localhost:9080/
5. Emergency Rocketchat: http://localhost:9081/
6. Emergency Wikipedia: http://localhost:9082/
7. Emergency Registration: http://localhost:9083/
8. Emergency OpenStreetMaps: http://localhost:9084/
9. OSM Tileserver: http://localhost:9085/
10. Local Mediaserver: http://localhost:9086/