Sophia Antipolis, 1 September 2023
The Report of the 3rd interoperability Plugtests™ event for the Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) is now available. All executed tests achieved an interoperability success rate of 86%.
These tests are essential to ensure seamless access to FRMCS over 5G networks across different vendors’ products and implementations.
Organized by ETSI with the support of the European Commission, EFTA, TCCA and UIC, the event took place from 3 July to 7 July 2023 at the UIC Headquarter in Paris, France, using a 5G test network. More than 300 tests were executed between the different vendors in more than 80 test sessions. Based on 3GPP Release-17, tests addressed the capabilities of FRMCS including Mission Critical Push to Talk (MCPTT), Mission Critical Data (MCData) and Mission Critical Video (MCVideo) – together abbreviated as MCX services.
The FRMCS Plugtests series is the first independent testing event of railways and other mission critical services over 5G networks.
The test cases, which have been amended with additional test scenarios, will be included in a future version of the specification ETSI TS 103 564. Besides the MCPTT, MCData and MCVideo Application Servers and Clients, the testing also included railways-oriented features and devices, railway emergency, etc. A test stream was dedicated for 3GPP RAN5 conformance testing. The event was complemented by an observer programme with presentations, roundtable discussions and demos for the observers.
The next FRMCS Plugtests event is planned for June 2024.