Configuring Cisco ISR 1100 router for 4g/3g Cellular communication
Coming to 4g configuration, this is
really interesting topic which I wanted to pick for a very long time and
thankfully I got newly manufactured and fresh in market router in my
hand. This is Cisco ISR1100 router which comes in many variant and is
just like the old 800 series routers. Cisco has WLAN model, LTE model,
DSL model and normal enterprise router model for this platform.The
difference between old 800 routers and this platform is that this is
IOS-XE based device with enhanced performance. You can find more details
on Cisco website about the model. I will also try to put some
introduction blogs for this.
Lets come to the point and configure Our
Cisco ISR 1111-4PLTEA router for cellular communication. Before jumping
into CLI we need to get a SIM card and an Antenna(no good signal in lab
) . Router has slots available for two SIM cards on the device. I have
inserted Airtel (4G subscriber in India) SIM card in the router . You
can see below image with SIM card and the Antenna installed.
Once the above setup is done we need to
enable cellular communication through the CLI configurations. Below is
step by step configuration.
We need to configure profile with the APN name which is airtelgprs.com in our case. You can get this information from the provider.
C1111-4PL#cellular 0/2/0 lte profile create 1 airtelgprs.com
Now
once the cellular profile is activated we can start configuring the
cellular interface and NAT etc so that we can have internal hosts in the
network to communicate the outside world.
Gig0/0/0 is the interface which connects
to my internal network and the cellular0/2/0 is the once bind with SIM
slot 0. Check out the configurations below …
! interface GigabitEthernet0/0/0 ip address 10.10.10.1 255.255.255.0 ip nat inside ! interface Cellular0/2/0 ip address negotiated ip nat outside dialer in-band dialer idle-timeout 0 dialer-group 1 ipv6 enable pulse-time 1 ! ip nat inside source list 1 interface Cellular0/2/0 overload ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 Cellular0/2/0 ! access-list 1 permit any dialer-list 1 protocol ip permit
If you are familiar with the cellular
configuration on the 800 series router you will notice that we do not
need to specify the encapsulation(Slip,ppp,hdlc etc ) here.
One this configuration is done DO NOT
forget to start the “interesting traffic” for the dialer ACL defined
range. Else you would not see the cellular interface negotiating IP
address.
C1111-4PL#sh interfaces cellular 0/2/0 Cellular0/2/0 is up, line protocol is up Hardware is LTE Adv TSN CAT6 - Multimode LTE/DC-HSPA+/HSPA+/HSPA/UMTS/EDGE/GPRS Internet address is 100.66.58.219/32 MTU 1500 bytes, BW 50000 Kbit/sec, DLY 20000 usec, reliability 255/255, txload 1/255, rxload 1/255 Encapsulation HDLC, loopback not set Keepalive not supported DTR is pulsed for 1 seconds on reset Last input never, output 14:32:42, output hang never Last clearing of "show interface" counters never Input queue: 0/375/0/0 (size/max/drops/flushes); Total output drops: 0 Queueing strategy: fifo Output queue: 0/40 (size/max) 5 minute input rate 0 bits/sec, 0 packets/sec 5 minute output rate 0 bits/sec, 0 packets/sec 9235 packets input, 1563495 bytes, 0 no buffer Received 0 broadcasts (0 IP multicasts) 0 runts, 0 giants, 0 throttles 0 input errors, 0 CRC, 0 frame, 0 overrun, 0 ignored, 0 abort 14387 packets output, 896568 bytes, 0 underruns 0 output errors, 0 collisions, 3 interface resets 0 unknown protocol drops 0 output buffer failures, 0 output buffers swapped out 0 carrier transitions C1111-4PL#show ip interface brief Interface IP-Address OK? Method Status Protocol GigabitEthernet0/0/0 10.10.10.1 YES NVRAM up up Cellular0/2/0 100.66.58.219 YES IPCP up up <----SNIP------->
Following are few verification commands,
you can see I am able to reach to the outside world, ping for 4.2.2.2 is
working and the signal strength is also good after putting Antenna to
the router. Before that the signal strength was less than -110 dBm and I
was getting hardly any ping response.
There are many other verification
commands but I think above set of details should be enough for you to
verify a working Cellular connection.
Thank You for visiting by blog. Please leave your comments and suggestion in the comment section.
Stay tuned for more.
