Project MACICO

Start date

MACICO will develop a concept for interworking of security organisations in their daily activity. It deals with cooperation of security organisations that do not use (in their day-to-day job) the same radio network, but in some missions could take benefit of a share of their respective infrastructure. Use cases such as pursuit of criminals across a border or close support of vehicles going through a border, disaster relief operations (water flood, earthquakes…) require security organisations from both countries to communicate together and to continue to communicate with their control room.

The members of an organisation must be allowed to use the foreign radio network to communicate. But the way to organize this foreign use of a radio network is to be defined and validated by security organisations authorities (availability of terminal for foreign users, their configuration, group communication over the border, ciphering mechanisms, control on gateways, …)

The work of the project will be carried out in cooperation with the public safety organisations that will be in charge to define under which conditions members from foreign organisations a priori working on heterogeneous networks will be able to cross the borders and how and to whom they shall communicate, without putting in danger the security features of the radio network.

The requirements for these communications will be led on concrete use cases (such as France-Spain, France–Belgium, Switzerland-Germany, Switzerland-France and Finland-Estonia borders; content and demo location are to be discussed in the frame of the project). Interworking at the border will then address Tetra-Tetrapol, Tetra-Tetra, and Tetrapol-Tetrapol interworking as well. From these requirements, the definition on the way to deploy terminals to foreign organisations, the way to organize and to deploy the solutions including gateways, will be declined in any of interworking cases.

The test bed developed in the project will consist in proving the capability for the users to exploit the foreign radio network to communicate with all the members of the “border” communication (radio from both networks, control room from both networks). Of course the development of the necessary “gateways” that will allow the communication across the border will be part of the test.

The project is innovative because it addresses not only the interoperability issue, but also the complete procedure that accepts foreign users on a security radio network (which is a priori forbidden for them) and look for a solution that keeps the intrinsic security mechanisms of such networks. Moreover MACICO paves the way towards the development of strong and meaningful interactions between narrowband public safety and LTE broad band networks.