Cisco ISR Bridging LTE – Cisco C899G LTE ISR as Transparent IP Router/Bridge

bridgingcisco-isrlte

I have a Cisco ISR router C899G with LTE Cellular interface. I'd like to bridge the LTE into one of the eth ports in order to tap the wan link into my firewall device. When I try the BVI method as follows:

interface Cellular0
  bridge-group 1

The device complains that the interface does not support bridging. How can I achieve simple transparent LTE Layer3 to ethernet routing? Could this somehow be achieved through dialer interfaces? I'm quite lost with this.

EDIT: by "bridging" I mean that IP traffic should be "bridged" transparently such that the public ip address is assigned to the firewall sitting behind the ISR LTE router in a same manner that many consumer appliance support (transparent connection on L3). IP communication should be transparent between wan and the firewall.

I have tried the following but the device behind GigabitEthernet9 does not get an ip:

!
bridge irb
bridge 1 protocol ieee
bridge 1 route ip
!
interface Cellular0
 no ip address
 ip virtual-reassembly in
 encapsulation slip
 ip tcp adjust-mss 1318
 dialer in-band
 dialer pool-member 1
 async mode interactive
 routing dynamic
!
interface GigabitEthernet9
 no ip address
 duplex auto
 speed auto
 bridge-group 1
!
interface Dialer1
 !ip address negotiated !With this we get  an ip for the dialer interface
 no ip address
 dialer pool 1
 dialer idle-timeout 0
 dialer string lte
 dialer persistent
 no cdp enable
 bridge-group 1
!

Best Answer

I think that's an X/Y-problem. What you need to do is route from LTE to IPoE (transparently or NATed) and then connect your firewall for analysis and filtering.

Bridging happens on the data link layer (L2) and that's impossible between LTE and IP due to framing differences. LTE encapsulates IP and IPoLTE to IPoE needs to be routed.

After all, there's little point in jumping through hoops trying to capture from the LTE interface (more or less directly) when you don't do any significant filtering before the firewall.

Edit: Here is a tested config for the isr router to achieve this passthrough routing with 1 to 1 nat:

!
interface Cellular0
 ip address negotiated
 ip nat outside
 ip virtual-reassembly in
 encapsulation slip
 ip tcp adjust-mss 1318
 dialer in-band
 dialer idle-timeout 0
 dialer string lte
 dialer-group 1
!
dialer-list 1 protocol ip permit
dialer-list 1 protocol ipv6 permit
!
interface GigabitEthernet9
 ip address 10.1.1.2 255.255.255.252
 ip nat inside
 duplex auto
 speed auto
!
ip nat inside source static 10.1.1.1 interface Cellular0
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 Cellular0
!

This works when the firewall/router wan interface is plugged into the isr routers ge9 port and the wan interface is configured with 10.1.1.1 ip address.