May 30, 2016

3GPP SA6 has recently decided on a set of new Release 14 specifications for mission critical services, preparing the way for video and data functionality to be added to the architecture already developed for mission critical push to talk (MCPTT) voice services.

The SA6 meeting #11 - in India last week - made progress in building a common architecture framework for all these mission critical services. The group also reached an initial agreement on the specific functional entities needed for video applications and it is expected that this will develop further in the next meetings - after approval of the service requirements. The group additionally agreed to start normative work for the data applications specification.

SA6 completed the MCPTT functional architecture, back in December 2015, with the approval of 3GPP TS 23.179. The specification has seen further improvements within Release 13, with more functionality to be added in a new specification for MCPTT in Release 14.

In parallel, the group has undertaken a couple of new studies. With an initial focus on MCPTT, but with a view to adding video and data soon:

• Enhancements for the use of MBMS for mission critical services (e.g. in areas such as service continuity, MBMS resource usage optimizations, QoS), where SA6 is now investigating possible technical solutions.
• Enhancements to allow for a mission critical services user to obtain service from a partner system (migration) and for communication between different mission critical systems (interconnect), where SA6 has just identified relevant scenarios for MCPTT groups calls and private calls.

Another area of focus is on interworking between LTE mission critical systems and non-LTE systems, such as systems compliant with P25, TETRA and legacy Land Mobile Radio (LMR).

Further reading:

• SA6 web page & links to documents
• TS22.280 Mission Critical Services Common Requirements
• TS22.281 Mission Critical Video over LTE
• TS23.179 Functional architecture and information flows to support mission critical communication services; Stage 2
• TR 23.779 Study on application architecture to support Mission Critical Push To Talk over LTE (MCPTT) services
  TR 23.780 Study on Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Service (MBMS) usage for mission critical communication services

Thanks to Yannick Lair, SA6 Chairman - For this update. The 3GPP contact for this article is Kevin FLYNN, Marketing and Communications Officer, 3GPP.