MCOP progress on show at CCW

Progress on the Mission Critical Open Platform (MCOP) collaborative project will be demonstrated live at Critical Communications World (CCW) in Berlin.

A full demo will be running on a real mission-critical-grade LTE system, to include MCPTT capabilities such as multicast (eMBMS) and high-priority bearer management with mission-critical QoS Class Identifiers.

The MCOP project, funded by the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), aims to meet the challenges of the emerging and complex MCPTT ecosystem.

The project, set to complete by mid-2019, will define, develop and validate an MCPTT client open platform that identifies neat open interfaces between the different technologies and reduce the integration efforts as well as a live and an online testbed for the applications.

The first MCOP software development kit (SDK) released together with the MCOP API (application protocol interface) will be available. With the MCOP SDK it will be easy to develop mission-critical MCPTT services. Most of the complexity of the mission-critical application will be ‘hidden’ in the SDK, facilitating simple application development for the emerging MCPTT ecosystem.

All MCOP components are fully compliant with 3GPP standards. At the CCW event, different stakeholders will be able to test out the MCPTT technology firsthand and see what can be achieved with a remarkably few lines of code.

MCOP is being designed to remove the entry barriers of multiple technologies and proprietary platforms. It will ensure interoperability and provide a catalyst for more players to enter the MCPTT market by making the business case more attractive.

MCOP is led by the University of the Basque Country with partners Bittium, Expway and TCCA, supported by Nemergent.

“The work of the MCOP partners will allow developers, public safety organisations and vendors to focus on assuring real mission-critical-grade operation rather than having to spend time and resources on the communication complexity,” said project coordinator Dr Fidel Liberal.

MCOP will be on stand D49 at CCW. Dr Fidel Liberal is presenting the project progress at the conference.

The MCOP demo will also be available at the 2018 Public Safety Broadband Stakeholder meeting in San Diego, USA, 5–8 June 2018. In order to ensure the interoperability with other MCPTT implementations, MCOP will participate in the second ETSI MCPTT Plugtests event in Texas, USA, 25–29 June 2018.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/SIKOV

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