Hosting an ETSI plugtest: 31 VPNs, one hundred twenty engineers, 2,a hundred check cases

What does it take to host an ETSI plug test occasion? A whole lot of bandwidth — actually and figuratively — months of planning, and a trio of lovable puppy mascots.

During a session on the International Wireless Communications Expo, Walt Magnussen, director of Texas A&M University’s Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center at TAMU’s Disaster City training facility in College Station, Texas, gave an insider’s attitude on web hosting the maximum recent undertaking-crucial push-to-communicate plugfest event. The week-long occasion last summer time changed into the second MCPTT plug test occasion, and the primary to check venture-critical records and video at the side of voice — in addition to the first public safety plug test occasion from ETSI that become held outside of Europe.

The first plug test occasion, held at ETSI headquarters in Sophia Antipolis, France, in the summertime of 2017, involved 19 companies and forty-seven test instances, with greater than 900 checks accomplished. The 2d plugtest event added together 31 companies, a hundred and twenty on-website online individuals and extra than 2, one hundred tests (based on LTE Release 14) run over the direction of five days.

“It’s brilliant surroundings to look at large agencies and small arguably competing and collaborating concurrently,” stated Christopher Walton, an electronics engineer with the Public Safety Communications Research unit on the National Institute for Standards and Technology. NIST’s PSCR changed into considered one of some organisations which observed the trying out.

Magnussen stated that critical elements contributed to Disaster City’s potential to play host for the plugtest: a large amount of bandwidth, on the way to guide virtual private networks to each of the participants’ far-flung belongings (which have been examined for 2 months beforehand of time to ensure that they could work when anybody turned into on-site), in addition to being a facility where it turned into rather smooth to herald a large group of people from all over the international — not always the case at, say, comfortable federal sites. Also, he stated, having an academic group as host intended that the organisers should dedicate numerous time to making the occasion an achievement, although they weren’t getting paid. You don’t host an ETSI occasion to get paid; he brought — “you need to do it because it’s benefitting the industry.”

The fulfilment fee for the testing came in at 92% — and the failed exams, because the final report notes, “provide the companies valuable records to improve their implementations. They additionally help to
discover ambiguities within the requirements and to make clear and improve the specifications.”

Plugtest activities provide the threat to see the reality of what’s occurring at the ground-stage in terms of ways standards are being applied.

“You learn there is a lot of ambiguity [in the standard]in a few cases,” Magnussen said. “Some options could cross two or 3 exceptional methods, and you have a majority of these agencies that get the usual and examine it, and frequently there are interpretations.”

Thus, the final file from ETSI includes a list of guidelines to 3GPP to make clear how its undertaking-crucial standards need to be carried out.

Despite the long days and the demanding technical situations — Magnussen warned that the real set-up time once contributors arrive inevitably approach journeys to purchase greater cables and power cords — the event wasn’t without its moments of amusing. Magnussen said that his wife breeds Doberman puppies, and three of them who have been around at the time had been dubbed MCPTT, MCData and MCVideo in honour of the three varieties of mission-vital LTE features being tested.