Conformance Testing and Reference Environment, Experimentation and Measurements

Description:

1 BACKGROUND The NATO Communications and Information Agency, NCIA, hereafter referred to as the Purchaser or NCIA. NCIA provides subject matter expert (SME) support to the assessment of 5G/IMT technologies for military applications. For Work Package 2 (WP2), the Contractor shall act as the Product Owner (PO) in the platform development activity and represent the Purchaser. The Product Owner shall own the responsibilities regarding the technical execution of the platform development and provide the Purchaser with implementation advice. Work Package 1 (WP1), Experimentation and Measurement Support. Under WP1, the Contractor provides an independent test, measurement, and analysis capability for these use cases, so that the experimentation produces calibrated, comparable, and reusable evidence for NATO capability development and standardisation. This WP will cover the following use cases: military private 5G for NATO Deployable CIS (DCIS), 5G Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) mesh relay for tactical coverage extension, Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) between UAS and a military private 5G network, and 5G Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) connectivity for dispersed Deployable HQ nodes. Work Package 2 (WP2), STANAG 5665 Conformance Testing, Mapping and Reference Environment. The capability to be developed is the STANAG 5665 Compliance and Test Platform (CTP), a certification system analogous to the Global Certification Forum (GCF) approach for commercial 5G, adapted to NATO governance. The CTP reuses existing 3GPP 5G NR conformance test cases wherever a STANAG 5665 capability is already covered, and authors new cases only for the specific delta. Formal testing is performed by authorised test centres situated in a NATO country, using validated commercial platforms. The 5G-CTP software implementation will be done by the Purchaser or by the contractor that the Purchaser. Authorship and ownership are separated throughout WP2. The Contractor authors and proposes the criteria, test cases, and logic design; the Purchaser reviews, adopts, and owns them, and provides the implementation of the software platform.