Expway and Mission Critical Open Platform Partners Awarded Grant by NIST
Expway, as part of a team of select partners, will build a public safety standards-based, open and interoperable reference platform designed to remove entry barriers to the emerging and complex MC-PTT ecosystem.
Expway, announced that it is part of a team that received a grant from the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for its Mission Critical Open Platform (MCOP). MCOP’s goal is to meet the challenges of the emerging and complex MCPTT ecosystem. The project will define and develop an open platform with standards-based interfaces between the different technology layers, to reduce integration efforts and speed-up adoption.
Other members of the project are Bittium which makes LTE Broadcast enabled rugged devices, the University of the Basque Country which provides a MCPTT server, and TCCA, the Critical Communications Association which represents TETRA, a long-established mission critical communications voice and narrowband data mobile standard.
Public safety agencies worldwide are migrating to cheaper, more secure, reliable and standardized Evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (eMBMS) based on Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks for their critical communications needs. LTE leverages open standards, is extremely reliable, and provides much needed agency interoperability. In addition, eMBMS allow first responders to efficiently communicate and collaborate with each other through group voice transmissions, real-time high-definition video streams, and large data transmissions.
However, the MCPTT ecosystem is complex due to the number of technologies involved, and the sometimes-conflicting interests of equipment vendors and service providers required to deploy these solutions.
“The MCOP project aims to reduce integration efforts in designing and building MCPTT solutions, by offering the market a plug-and-play open standards-based platform,” said Claude Seyrat, Expway Co-Founder and CMO. “Expway eBox for Critical Communications is an important piece of the puzzle, designed to bring such complex projects quickly to fruition.”
MCOP will develop interoperability guidelines designed to ease the making of the standards-based, reliable solutions, safety agencies seek. Researchers, developers, security agencies and equipment vendors will be able to use MCOP to test, evaluate, compare and validate their individual MCPTT solution components. The platform takes into account existing and upcoming Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards, current LTE and future 5G network architectures.
The MCOP Project will be using the Expway eBox for Critical Communications, a complete, compact and portable 3GPP compliant eMBMS LTE network for public safety critical communications. Expway already successfully took part in a full MCPTT integration test at the last European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) MCPP PlugTest in June 2017.
