Gateway Process - Austrian-Broadcasting-Services/obeca-info GitHub Wiki

The Gateway Process presents the heart of OBECA. Its main task is to provide the best available content to the (internal or external) application at any time. If available, it combines content from (mobile) broadband, WiFi with the 5G BC content from the Receive Process using an advanced decision logic. The content is presented to the applications in form of an intelligent edge cache ready for pick up via http(s).

• How it works
• Installation
• Run the Gateway Process
• Configuration

Status: The specific parts of the Gateway Process, especially outer interfaces and the surrounding environment is currently subject of investigation of the project team. The project team targets to use as much as possible from existing specifications and concepts (3GPP, DVB,...) for the Gateway Process.

How it works

• In the current release 0.9.x the Gateway Process uses the UDP multicast IP packets from the Receive Process.
• If the payload contains FLUTE decoded content (files, i.e. Service Announcement, DASH, HLS) the Gateway Process decodes the packets with its FLUTE/ALC decoder into files.
• The Gateway Process includes a web-cache server and each service is available like an CDN publishing point including manifest and segment files.
• Information how to access the endpoints (e.g. URL to manifest.m3u8 or manifest.mpd) can be found on the corresponding Gateway tab in the GUI or Webinterface.

Note: The FLUTE/ALC decoder is available as an independent repository (library) here and includes encoding/decoding functionalities.

Installation

Installation of the Gateway Process consists of 2 steps:

1. Install dependencies
2. Building the Gateway Process

Please see the README file in the gateway process repository for the installation guide.

Run the Gateway Process

The configuration for the Gateway Process (file paths, max file age, api ports, ...) can be changed in the configuration file. When starting, the Gateway Process listens to the local tun interface. Received multicast packets from the Receive Process are FLUTE decoded and the files are stored in the cache.

Background process

The Gateway Process runs manually or as a background process (daemon). If the process terminates due to an error, it is automatically restarted. With systemd, execution, automatic start and manual restart of the process can be configured or triggered (systemctl enable / disable / start / stop / restart). Starting, stopping and configuring autostart for gw: The standard systemd mechanisms are used to control gw:

Command	Result
systemctl start gw	Manually start the process in background
systemctl stop gw	Manually stop the background process
systemctl status gw	Show process status
systemctl disable gw	Disable autostart, gw will not be started after reboot
systemctl enable gw	Enable autostart, gw will be started automatically after reboot

Manual start/stop

After installing the Gateway Process you can start the process manually in the terminal using the command gw. This will start the gw with default log level (info). Gateway Process can be used with the following OPTIONs:

Option		Description
-c	--config=FILE	Configuration file (default: /etc/obeca.conf)
-i	--interface=IF	IP address of the interface to bind flute receivers to (default: 192.168.180.10)
-l	--log-level=LEVEL	Log verbosity: 0 = trace, 1 = debug, 2 = info, 3 = warn, 4 = error, 5 = critical, 6 = none. Default: 2.
-?	--help	Give this help list
-V	--version	Print program version

Configuration

Config file

The config file for Gateway Process is located in /etc/obeca.conf. The file contains configuration parameters for:

• Cache
• HTTP-Server

gw:
{
  cache: {
    base_path: "/tmp/obeca"; # Path where files shall be cached
    max_file_age: 25;    /* seconds */
    max_total_size: 512; /* megabyte */
  }
  http_server: {
    uri: "http://0.0.0.0:3020/";
    api_path: "gw-api";
    cert: "/usr/share/obeca/cert.pem";
    key: "/usr/share/obeca/key.pem";
    api_key:
    {
      enabled: false;
      key: "106cd60-76c8-4c37-944c-df21aa690c1e";
    }
  }
}