Mobile Phone Tests¶

Sipfront provides the ability to integrate real mobile devices into your test scenarios. This is achieved by running the Sipfront mobile agent in your premises and connecting your phones to it via Bluetooth. The mobile agent runs either on a Raspberry Pi with the Sipfront image, or as a VM on a Linux host (a laptop or small PC) with a USB Bluetooth dongle; both behave the same way.

With this approach, you can test calls from SIP or WebRTC via your peerings to the mobile network and vice versa, utilizing the radio technology your phones are attached to, such as 4G or 5G.

Requirements¶

In any case:

• Any phone (Android, Apple, ...) with Hands-Free support via Bluetooth (any reasonably newish phone with Bluetooth should work)
• A custom agent pool in the Account > Agent Pools menu

Plus one of the two platforms for the mobile agent:

Installation¶

Both platforms are configured through the same sipfront.txt file; only where that file lives differs.

Option A: Raspberry Pi¶

1. Download the latest Sipfront image for Raspberry Pi from the Sipfront CDN.
2. Flash the image onto the microSD card using a tool like Balena Etcher. Check our Generic Raspberry Pi Installation Guide for more details.
3. Reinsert the microSD card using your SD card reader on your machine where you flashed the image (it will show as bootfs in your drives list) and open sipfront.txt with a text editor.
4. Set the following configuration. If you did not yet create a custom agent pool, do so first in the Account > Agent Pools menu.

# the device will be accessible in your LAN via $AGENT_HOSTNAME.local
AGENT_HOSTNAME="sipfront-agent"

# fill in your Sipfront agent credentials
AGENT_POOL_ID="your-pool-id"
AGENT_POOL_SECRET="your-pool-secret"
AGENT_POOL_GROUP="raspi"

# fill in your WiFi credentials to enable wifi
AGENT_WIFI_SSID="your-wifi-ssid"
AGENT_WIFI_PASSWORD="your-wifi-pass"

# set to yes to enable mobile phone testing via bluetooth
AGENT_PHONE_DRIVER="yes"

# set http proxy if needed, otherwise leave empty
AGENT_PROXY=""

If everything went fine, you should see your agent (listed as raspi if you used the configuration above) online in the Account > Agent Pools menu.

Option B: Linux host with a USB Bluetooth dongle¶

1. Prepare the host as described in Running agents in a VM on your laptop: install QEMU, allow your user to use KVM, and add the udev rule for the dongle.
2. Download and unpack the Sipfront agent VM for your host, e.g. sipfront-agent-vm-amd64-latest.tar.xz for an x86_64 laptop.
3. Open sipfront.txt in the unpacked directory and set the same configuration as above: AGENT_POOL_ID, AGENT_POOL_SECRET, AGENT_POOL_GROUP and AGENT_PHONE_DRIVER="yes". The Wi-Fi settings have no effect, the VM uses the host's network.
4. Plug in the USB Bluetooth dongle and start the VM with ./run.sh. It reboots once to enable the Bluetooth stack, downloads the Sipfront agent image and connects to the Sipfront infrastructure; ./stop.sh from another terminal shuts it down again.

After a few minutes the agent shows up online in the Account > Agent Pools menu, exactly like a Raspberry Pi. The phone pairing and the downloaded agent image are kept on the VM disk, so later starts are quick and the phone reconnects on its own.

Connecting your phone¶

The mobile agent is discoverable as a Bluetooth hands-free device under its AGENT_HOSTNAME (sipfront-agent for the Raspberry Pi, sipfront-vm for the VM, unless you changed it in sipfront.txt). Pairing is accepted automatically, no PIN or confirmation is needed on the agent side, and the phone reconnects on its own after a reboot of the agent or the phone.

iPhones¶

1. On your phone, navigate to Settings > Bluetooth and enable Bluetooth.
2. In the list of available devices, you should see sipfront-agent or sipfront-vm (or the AGENT_HOSTNAME you set in the sipfront.txt config file) listed. Tap on it to connect.
3. If it asks you to allow syncing contacts etc., allow it.

Android Phones¶

1. On your phone, navigate to Settings > Connections > Bluetooth and enable Bluetooth.
2. In the list of available devices, you should see sipfront-agent or sipfront-vm (or the AGENT_HOSTNAME you set in the sipfront.txt config file) listed. Tap on it to connect.
3. If it asks you to allow syncing contacts etc., allow it.

Create your first test¶

1. In the Sipfront app, navigate to an existing test project or create a dedicated project for your mobile phone tests.
2. Click the Create new test button at the top.
3. Give it a descriptive name and description.
4. Select the Mobile call - Calling Party Only test scenario, which is the most simple mobile test to start with.
5. Under Choose agent pool, select the agent pool you configured in your sipfront.txt configuration file.
6. Under Agent Group in the Configure your caller select raspi (or the group you defined in AGENT_POOL_GROUP in your sipfront.txt). Note that the group only becomes available once the Sipfront agent on your Raspberry Pi or VM is online. If it's missing, it's a good indicator that there is a general configuration problem with the device.
7. Enter the phone number you'd like to call in the Dial Destionation field of the section below, and optionally adapt the Stop after time limit (e.g. setting it to 30 for a first quick test).
8. At the bottom, click Save & Run.

This should trigger the test to run, and you should see the phone coming to life automatically after a few seconds, displaying the native dialer screen and showing the call being placed to the destination number you specified.