The Mission Critical Open Platform (MCOP) is a collaborative project with the financial assistance award 70NANB17H151 from U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology through the Public Safety Innovation Acceleration Program (PSIAP). MCOP aims at facing the challenges of the new MCPTT complex ecosystem through the definition, development and validation of a MCPTT UE Open Platform (MCOP) that identifies neat interfaces between the different technologies in the UEs, reduces the integration efforts and removes the entry barriers.

NIST created the NIST Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program to push innovation on 6 areas on Mission Critical communications (multi-year) and managed by PSCR labs staff (Boulder, Colorado). In the first call 33 proposals were awarded.

The University of the Basque Country is the leading founder of MCOP, together with TCCA [global representative organisation for critical communications worldwide], Expway [eMBMS world experts] and Bittium [Ruggedized UE manufacturer] and supported by Nemergent [MCPTT pioneers].

This collaborative project aims at facing the new challenges of the new MCPTT complex ecosystem through the definition, development and validation of a MCPTT UE Open Platform (MCOP) that identifies neat interfaces between the different technologies in the UEs, reduces the integration efforts and removes the entry barriers.

The MCOP platform will include different level APIs for apps and UE’s MC capabilities integration, the release of a real MC-grade (with eMBMS and Rel’13 and beyond features) Open Source reference implementation of both a MCPTT client and PS specific application in Android and the deployment and maintenance of both an on-site and online live testing platform in which researchers, developers and other practitioners can test, evaluate and validate their MCPTT compliant innovative APPs.

These objectives demand a highly skilled and heterogeneous consortium covering the different technology areas. MCOP brings together relevant actors from the Industry, eMBMS and MC UE vendor-sectors leaded by a neutral Academia partner (UPV/EHU) that is deeply involved in MCPTT interoperability activities.
Finally, the project requires the availability of the server-side components in order to carry out the functional and performance validation. Although the project includes a small budget (assigned to an specialized external third party) for deploying and maintaining the online live testing platform during the project lifetime, the consortium will perform the required integration effort with other server-side components potentially deployed at PSCR labs (on-site live testing platform).

Although MCOP targets technological challenges mainly the whole PS community and specially the PSOs will benefit for the project outcomes through an intensive dissemination strategy. The availability of MC-grade UE open architecture and Open Source implementation will speed up the commercial product release cycle, enable new stakeholders to enter the PS ecosystem and improve the awareness and common understanding of PSOs and both PS industry and researchers of the MCPTT suite of protocols. Additionally, MCOP plans to contribute to the innovation acceleration program by making available the resulting UE-side software components at PSCR and live testing facilities.