Friday 28 August 2015

MCPTT Off-network and UE to UE/Network Relays

3GPP SA6 recently held a workshop on Mission Critical Push To Talk (MCPTT) stage 3 development in Canada. You can look at the meeting report here and download any presentations from here.

An interesting presentation that caught my attention was one on "MCPTT Off-network Architecture". The presentation is embedded below where it is described technically what is meant by Off-network. From my understanding an off-network from MCPTT point of view is one where the UE does not have network coverage.

In such a situation a UE can connect to another UE that can connect to UE/network (if available) to relay the message. Its similar to another technology that I have talked about, Multihop Cellular Networks and ODMA. Anyway, here is the presentation:



Sometimes the standards can take too long to develop a feature and apps can come and deliver a similar service at a very short notice. One such App that does something similar is called Firechat, which played a big role in many protests worldwide. The video explaining it below is worth watching.


The problem with Apps is that they cannot be used by the emergency services or other governmental organisations, unless a standard feature is available. This is the expectation from this Off-network relays. It would work in combination with D2D/ProSe.


For anyone interested in the latest Public Safety (PS), here is a presentation by SA6 chairman from July

4 comments:

Manoj Das said...

Zahid, Good info on MCPTT.You are correct, Off-network is when there is no network coverage still mission Critical working team can communicate among themselves UE to UE.

Zahid Ghadialy said...

Thanks Manoj.

Peter Clemons said...

It's great to see how far the critical communications work within 3GPP has come over the past 3 years or so. This demonstrates how fundamental the work is not just for public safety & disaster relief agencies but also other critical sectors and the wider community. There's still plenty of work to be done to get as much as possible into R13 before it freezes, but this is definitely a core long-term 4G/5G project for 3GPP and other organisations that will create a more robust, resilient & feature-rich standardised product for a wide section of society. What I forgot to fit into my previous comment is the need for more people within the industry to publicise SA6's valuable work, so thank you once again Zahid Ghadialy for your support!

Pat said...

Cellular V2X should have a lot great functionality leading towards autonomous driving. I also found this presentation to be useful: http://www.slideshare.net/qualcommwirelessevolution/powerpoint-messaging-cellular-v2x