Valid8 Mission Critical Server Conformance Tester - An innovative apparatus for ensuring the standards compliance of mission critical public safety servers for MCPTT, MCData and MCVideo (MCX)

To achieve the goals for the DHS SBIR topic “MCX Server-to-Server Communication, voice communications, 3GPP-Standards” (DHS231-005) to develop a unified process, strategy, and methodology to achieving interoperability of MCX server-to-server communications and to create a test tool for conformance and interoperability testing for MCX server-to-server communications, we will develop the Valid8 MCX Server Tester; an initial prototype test tool that will enable testing of MCX Servers for compliance to 3GPP protocol specifications 36.579-3, over a direct ethernet/WiFi connection. The prototype will be implemented to execute the two Server-to-Server tests 7.1 and 7.2 defined in 3GPP TS 36.579-3.The prototype will be built using the existing state-of-the-art Protocol Engine test platform which has the ability to quickly create executable tests.It is easily expandable for emerging standards and defined test cases. It enables execution of tests both locally and remotely via VPN via Linux-based, platform with HTTP API.Using this tool, we will test a commercial MCX Server and the Valid8 MCX Server emulator, understand the challenges for Server-to-Server conformance and interoperability, and will iterate and revise the test scenarios based on the practical learnings accordingly. This methodology and process will be executed and experimented for MC-PTT and if successful, this process can also be used for MC-Data, MC-Video.From this work, a requirements matrix as well as a process and methodology for testing conformance and interoperability will be documented for MCX Server-to-Server Conformance Tests.