E-CARES Research Project

The E-CARES research project is a cooperation between Ericsson Eurolab Deutschland GmbH (EED) and the Department of Computer Science III , RWTH Aachen. E-CARES is an acronym for Ericsson Communication ARchitecture for Embedded Systems. The cooperation aims to develop methods, concepts, and tools to support the processes of understanding and restructuring complex legacy telecommunication systems. The subject of study is Ericsson's Mobile-service Switching Center (MSC) for GSM networks called AXE10.

Currently, our research activities have concentrated on reverse engineering the legacy system's code on the one hand and on development of suitable modeling language extensions on the other hand. The reverse engineering activities comprise development of suitable parser, analyzer and visualization tools as well as integration of these tools to form a multi-language modular reverse engineering environment. Several prototypes have been built so far. Modeling activities focus on the definition of telecom specific extensions to the ROOM language (Realtime Object-Oriented Modelling). There are various proposals that are submitted to different working groups. Please, visit our publications section for more information.

An introduction to our reengineering tools will be available in the tools section soon. Furthermore, we are planning to add a guided tour to our tools in medium-term. For a first glance, we have already put some screenshots online.