ETSI is pleased to release the Report of its sixth MCX Plugtests event. Organized with the support of the European Commission, EFTA, TCCA and UIC, it was held in hybrid mode from 8 to 19 November 2021, with LTE assisted testing at University of Malaga, Spain. Vendors had the possibility to send equipment to the University of Malaga (UMA) for participating in end-to-end testing. They could use the LTE test network available on the premises and rely on the UMA experts onsite to run interoperability test sessions on the network without being present.

The Report disclosed that the 6th ETSI MCX Plugtests has concluded with a success rate of 97.6% of the executed tests for 3GPP mission critical services vendor interoperability. For the first time, the Interworking Function (IWF) with non-3GPP Land Mobile Radio (LMR) systems ETSI TETRA and P25 were tested.

150 participants from all over the world, executed around 1 300 test cases in 205 test sessions, interoperability results were reported in the ETSI Test reporting tool. The purpose of this event was to verify the interoperability as defined in the 3GPP MCX standards and to check end-to-end functionality. The testing was based on the latest 3GPP Release 16 specifications.

The features tested during the MCX event included MCPTT, MCVideo, MCData, Interworking Function (IWF-1 interface), railways-oriented capabilities (FRMCS) and 3GPP RAN5 conformance testing. The Plugtests enabled companies to assess the level of interoperability of their implementations and verify the correct interpretation of the 3GPP MCX standards.

36 new test cases developed during the event will be added to ETSI TS 103 564, the specification for PlugtestsTM scenarios for Mission Critical Services, which will raise the total of use cases to 262 in addition to 12 observer scenarios.

Around eleven observations on the 3GPP technical specifications were collected which will be forwarded to respective working groups of 3GPP for clarifications.

In parallel, during an observer programme, attendees provided progress on Mission critical services deployment as well as GCF MCX conformance and GCF Field-Testing Certification and vendors could demonstrate their interoperable solutions.