Going far together
The work to ensure that user organisations get the interoperable mission-critical
broadband ecosystem they require continues to progress, despite one significant
stumbling block. Sam Fenwick explains
2013 was a memorable year for many reasons – the
death of Nelson Mandela, the birth of Prince
George, and the Boston Marathon Bombing, to
name just a few. However, from our industry’s
perspective, the most memorable event – and the
one with the most long-term ramifications – took place on 31
October. TCCA’s signing of the 3GPP Partnership Agreement
was the first clear step on the road we have been travelling
for the past six years. It marked the start of the unceasing
work to standardise the features that are required if missioncritical
two-way radio users are to fully benefit from the wider
telecommunications ecosystem and eventually replace their
radios with broadband equivalents.
However, it must be remembered that standards are not
the only piece of the puzzle. For there to be an ecosystem of
mission-critical devices, servers and applications that allows
government agencies and end-user organisations to buy with
confidence, they need to know that they will not be tied to
a single vendor due to technical issues such as ambiguities in
how to implement the mission-critical standards.
For this reason, ETSI has been running its MCX Plugtests
series, which brings together vendors and industry observers.
The third such event (which involved remote testing only via
ETSI’s HIVE virtual private network) took place earlier this
year and was based on 3GPP Release 14. Over two months,
1,000 test cases and more than 150 sessions were run between
26 vendors, and the event achieved a 92 per cent success rate.
Saurav Arora, project manager (MCX Plugtests and 3GPP
WG CT3), says the observations and results from the event
were compiled and sent to ETSI and 3GPP TSG SA WG6
(the working group focused on mission-critical applications).
This process was driven by FirstNet, and Arora says it will
take 3-4 months to receive all the answers to the queries that
were generated, and of the 20-25 issues that were identified,
there were no stumbling blocks from a hardware perspective,
although there were “some minor issues and some issues
related to affiliation. There are a lot of clarifications, but no
blocking point, some of them are improvements.”
The fourth MCX (MCPTT, MCData and MCVideo)
Plugtest will take place from 23-27 September at the Savonia
University of Applied Sciences in Kuopio, Finland, after two
and half months of remote testing. It is being organised by
ETSI, in partnership with Erillisverkot, with the support
of TCCA and the European Commission. The event will
mainly focus on tests with radio equipment (eNodeBs, user
equipment, and evolved packet cores) with Unicast and
Multicast support, but will also allow over-the-top testing of
mission-critical servers and clients.
Arora says: “The biggest challenge is that we still
haven’t seen much progress on MCData and MCVideo
interoperability testing. I’m looking forward to seeing more
support from the vendors in these areas – they’re quite new
as they were introduced in Release 14, so we might have
to wait a bit. I’m hoping that during September’s Plugtest
we might see more MCData and MCVideo testing and
implementations, but the priority will still be MCPTT.”
Harald Ludwig, chairman of TCCA’s Technical Forum,
highlights the number of vendors that have signed up for
September’s Plugtest – 35 – indicates the vendor community
“are all aware of the importance of interoperability and
conformance to standards. The vendors are all aware that this
is important and of the need to go down this route.”
July 2019 @CritCommsToday 13
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Interoperability