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 perspective on web hosting the maximum recent, crucial push-to-communicate plugfest event. Last summer, the week-long occasion 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 was held outside of Europe.
The first plug test occasion, held at ETSI headquarters in Sophia Antipolis, France, in the summer of 2017, involved 19 companies and forty-seven test instances, with more than 900 tests accomplished. The 2d plugfest event added together 31 companies, a hundred and twenty on-site individuals, and more than 2 one hundred tests (based on LTE Release 14) run over five days.
“It’s a brilliant setting 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 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST’s PSCR changed into considered one of the organizations that observed the testing.
Magnussen stated that critical elements contributed to Disaster City’s potential to play host for the plug test: 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 that having an academic group as host meant that the organizers dedicated numerous times 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 benefiting the industry.”
The fulfillment 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.” Plugfest activities provide the opportunity to see the reality of what’s occurring at the ground stage in terms of how 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 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 approaches journeys to purchase greater cables and power cords — the event wasn’t without its moments of amusement. Magnussen said that his wife breeds Doberman puppies. Three of them, who had been around at the time, had been dubbed MCPTT, MCData, and MCVideo in honor of the three varieties of mission-critical LTE features being tested.
