Test equipment and the mission critical services ecosystem

The Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) division, housed within the NIST Communications Technology Laboratory, conducts research for the first responder community. In 2012, NIST was mandated by the US Congress to, among other things, accelerate the development of mission critical voice for the nationwide public safety broadband network.

PSCR conducted extensive stakeholder engagement starting in 2013 to address the requirements of the legislation, including hosting two roundtable events in 2016 and 2017 focused on Mission Critical Voice (MCV) with stakeholders from public safety, government, and industry. In addition to funding internal research addressing these areas, in 2017 PSCR awarded $14M for nine grants and cooperative agreements to address aspects related to the MCV research portfolio goals. Specific areas of these awards include research into Mission Critical Push-to-Talk (MCPTT) and Device-to-device (D2D) functionality. Outcomes of these awards include the creation of a commercial grade MCPTT application server, MCPTT Android applications, and development of the full Proximity Services (also known as ProSe) Sidelink protocol stack.