First release of MCOP SDK to be available at CCW Berlin

08 May 2018: Showcasing the ease with which mission critical push-to-talk (MCPTT) applications can be brought to market, the progress of the Mission Critical Open Platform (MCOP) collaborative project will be demonstrated live at Critical Communications World (CCW) in Berlin next week.

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 first MCOP software development kit (SDK) release 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 first hand 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.

The MCOP project, funded by the U.S. 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. MCOP is led by the University of the Basque Country with partners Bittium, Expway and TCCA, supported by Nemergent.

Project co-ordinator Dr Fidel Liberal said: “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.”

MCOP will be on stand D49 at CCW. Dr Fidel Liberal is presenting the project progress at the CCW conference on May 16th at 12 noon.

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.

Contact: info@mcopenplatform.org or editor@tcca.info