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Chapter 19: ProfessionalTechnical Support and its Evolution Section 1: The Permanent Nucleus in the CEPT Environment Bernard Mallinder1 During late 1985 the CEPT Groupe Spe´cial Mobile G

Chapter 19: Professional

Technical Support and its

Evolution

Section 1: The Permanent Nucleus in the CEPT Environment

Bernard Mallinder1

During late 1985 the CEPT Groupe Spe´cial Mobile (GSM) decided that in the interest of maintaining speed and quality in the development of the technical recommendations, a central support function was required The mandate for this unit was agreed in early 1986 and the ‘‘Permanent Nucleus’’ (PN) of the GSM was created The approach and mandate of the unit built on the successful experience that the CEPT had had in the rapid development of specifications for both satellite and ISDN services The unit was established in Paris during the summer of 1986 and consisted of full-time technical managers and programme managers The PN had expert full-time resources from France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Holland, Switzerland and the UK

The initial tasks involved supporting the working group chairpersons, ensuring technical consistency, documentation release control, consolidation of work-plans and reporting progress to the plenary of GSM Within a year the role of the PN extended to the creation

of the equipment specifications (11 Series) and the formulation of the network management recommendations (12 Series) In addition, the PN was charged with the co-ordination of the evaluation of the different candidate technologies for the radio interface These tests were undertaken by CNET in Paris and involved the evaluation of TDMA and CDMA offerings After the choice for TDMA with slow frequency hopping, GSM entered into a review of the complexity of the complete system Initial work undertaken by Televerket in Sweden indicated that the layer 3 protocol on the air interface resulted in an extensive acquisition time during the initial ‘‘turn-on’’ period The ‘‘Complexity Review’’ commenced during late 1987 and continued until the spring of 1988 During this period all working groups contributed and

a number of review meetings were co-ordinated by the PN in Paris The findings and suggested improvements were tested and examined in various centres including CNET in France, FTZ in Germany, CSELT in Italy, BT and Racal Research in the UK As a result of

1 The views expressed in this chapter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of his affiliation entity.

GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication

Edited by Friedhelm Hillebrand Copyright q 2001 John Wiley & Sons Ltd ISBNs: 0-470-84322-5 (Hardback); 0-470-845546 (Electronic)

this work a catalogue of ‘‘simplifications’’ was formulated and approved by GSM The first drafts of the complete recommendations (Series 1-12) were made available to participating parties by the summer of 1988

In parallel with the ‘‘Complexity Review’’ the PN was charged with evaluating the indus-trial challenges involved in the design and manufacture of future handsets This work was principally supported by industry experts who were in a position to create ‘‘top-down-design’’

of complete handsets Fabrication of the logical functions, the RF entities, casing and battery technologies were considered Assumptions were constructed concerning the availability of sub-micron technologies, yield rates of new chipsets and performance of external and inte-grated antennae The input from this study placed additional pressure on the need to reduce complexity to ensure that the price, weight and performance targets for the handsets could be achieved

During the evaluation of the early radio interface proposals GSM began to consider the possible impact of intellectual property on the development of the system Ideas concerning

‘‘cross’’ and ‘‘pooled’’ licensing were considered There was however a need to identify relevant patents and to consolidate a list of ‘‘vital’’ patents The PN was charged with the task and Patent Review Group consisting of network operators and manufactures was active during 1987 At the end of the process some 22 previous patents were identified as ‘‘vital’’ Some of these belonged to operators and others to vendors Numerous initiatives followed the identification of the patents Members of the GSM group then sought to secure commercial, political and/or technical solutions to the patents

As the definition of the GSM system stabilised interest in the system began to develop Various conferences emerged as did requests for technical papers and workshops Members

of the PN were invited to numerous technical presentations and discussions The important points which needed to be communicated were the progress of the technical work, innovative services, interworking with ISDN and data networks, coverage techniques and the functional architecture Less technical areas were also addressed including specification methodology, consistency management, release control and eventually system performance

Chapter 19: Professional

Technical Support and its

Evolution

Section 2: PT12 and PT SMG in the ETSI Environment

Ansgar Bergmann1

When, in 1989, ETSI was created, GSM became a technical committee of ETSI, and the Permanent Nucleus (PN) was transformed to become ETSI Project Team 12 (PT12) Some time later, at the end of 1991, the offices were moved from Paris to the ETSI premises in Sophia Antipolis

Between 1989 and 2000, PT12 and later PT SMG continued the work of the PN to perform the project management for the Technical Committee GSM and later SMG, to maintain overall aspects of the specifications such as quality, consistency and compatibility, to support working parties of GSM/SMG and to perform specific tasks including specification work In this period, GSM grow up with breathtaking speed, in terms of users, of countries to introduce GSM, of networks, of variety of services offered to the users and of applicable frequency bands, and the GSM core network became the de facto standard platform to connect other radio access technologies

PT12 was financed from the ETSI funded work program, and there was additional specific funding from the EC, from GSM MoU Group/Association (later GSM Association), and from member companies This additional funding was often related to specific tasks and deliver-ables For the sake of bookkeeping, separate project teams were installed for these specific tasks However, all these project teams were managed in one integrated structure, and

‘‘PT12’’ was used as a generic term for the varying number of tasks

Until 1995, PT12 was responsible for GSM only, and did not support the UMTS devel-opment within SMG In 1996, ETSI agreed, on proposal of SMG, to assign project team support to UMTS in order to push the development The new PT83 was integrated with PT12

as well, and to give things better visibility, the integrated team was named PT SMG

1 The views expressed in this section are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of his affiliation entity.

GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication

Edited by Friedhelm Hillebrand Copyright q 2001 John Wiley & Sons Ltd ISBNs: 0-470-84322-5 (Hardback); 0-470-845546 (Electronic)

19.2.1 Consolidation of GSM Phase 1

In the years 1989–1992, the main focus of activities in GSM and PT12 was the consolidation

of phase 1 specifications in order to enable the roll-out of the GSM system and the availability

of mobile stations

An important milestone was the edition of Release 90 phase 1 specifications For monitor-ing the status of specifications and to trace all changes, PT12 had established a Change Request (CR) procedure At GSM#25, this procedure was further improved2 and it was decided to go on with two parallel series, the phase 1 and phase 2 specifications, cf Section

17 on working methods The scope of phase 1 and 2 was defined by GSM MoU

PT12 also led two expert groups:

† PT12-OMEG, the Operation and Maintenance Experts Group, which was transformed in

1992 into the technical subcommittee SMG6 of SMG;

† PT12-ES3, responsible for the test specifications for the mobile station and the base station sub-system; in 1994, it was transformed into two SMG subcommittees, SMG7 (mobile station testing) and SMG8 (BSS testing)

Free circulation of mobile stations was one of the essential goals of GSM Mobile stations had to work correctly and with good quality in any GSM network This explains the impor-tance of the mobile station type approval regime PT12 took an essential role, in cooperation with other groups including

† Type Approval Advisory Board (TAAB) and its successor organisations;

† GSM MoU;

† ECTEL-TMS;

† EU organisations such as TRAC and ACTE

The interim type approval, then the full type approval was installed Later, the transition to the new legal scheme defined by the EC, the CTR/TBR regime, had–be managed, and with a tremendous effort, GSM was the first–implement the CTR/TBR regime See also Sections 14 and 17.2

In 1990, GSM became responsible for standardizing DCS1800, at that time also known as Personal Communication Networks (PCN) It was agreed to specify DCS 1800 as a version of GSM in the 1800 band In phase 1, there were delta specifications for DCS 1800, mainly concerning adaptation of radio transmission parameters, but also necessary consequences of the added frequency band for signalling, testing, the SIM card, cell selection and network selection, and special requirements of the DCS 1800 operators for equipment sharing and national roaming The DCS 1800 activities were supported by experts working in an exten-sion of PT12, funded by interested parties (the PCN operators)

19.2.2 Introduction of GSM Phase 2

The need to introduce GSM in phases had already been recognized before 1990 Some features had been deferred rather early to phase 2, for example:

2 Cf TDoc P-482/89 rev2.

3 ES stands ‘‘Eleven Series’’: the MS and BSS test specifications were 11.10 and 11.20.

† some services, in particular supplementary services;

† radio resource management functions as the pseudo-synchronous handover

(Some features like facsimile, data services and the half-rate speech codec were moved later to phase 2 due to technical difficulties arising.) Accordingly, the GSM working parties had started already in 1989 to elaborate and agree phase 2 change requests, however the GSM plenary had in principle postponed phase 2 approvals until meeting #30 in 1991 This way of proceeding had the advantage that

† work concentrated on getting phase 1 working; and

† a more complete picture of phase 2 was achieved before detailed technical decisions were taken

It had the disadvantage, however, that for some considerable time, phase 2 change requests were prepared in the working parties on a moving basis – changing versions of the phase 1 specifications – a fact leading to several clashes and contradictions Whence, a consolidation phase became necessary to establish the platform for phase 2 A major part of this work was performed by PT12 and the rapporteurs of specifications

Other activities demanding high support by PT12/PT SMG related to

† the merging of GSM 900 and DCS1800 specifications;

† phase 2 mobile station type approval, including the creation of phase 2 TBRs and the translation of tests into the formal test description language TTCN

19.2.3 The Evolution of GSM Phase 21

In 1995, the phase 2 specifications were frozen as version 4.x.y The further evolution of GSM took place as phase 21 (cf Section 20), the basic concept being to add new features as options Depending on the completion date of specifications, features were assigned to yearly releases R96, R97 and so on

With a slightly increased number of experts, PT SMG started to provide support to all SMG Sub-Technical Committees (STCs; the number had grown from 4 to 11; earlier, some STCs did not have PT SMG support) and almost all working groups

There was substantial discussion about the appropriate way to document the evolving GSM system in the standard, and it was then decided to create a parallel new complete set of specifications for each release

PT SMG expanded the project management, a roadmap was created to reflect the progress

of each work item, and this roadmap was derived from a work item database maintained by

PT SMG For bigger work items, work item managers were nominated and project descrip-tion documents were created in the 10.xy series

With the increase of participating companies, the introduction of electronic document handling became more and more important SMG started to provide all meeting documents

in electronic form and made them available on CD-ROM; step by step, the meetings went from paper documents to electronically only distributed documents, and today all ETSI and 3GPP specifications and meeting documents are available on the Web (www.etsi.org and www.3GPP.org), much work is done in e-mail discussion groups, and meetings use LANs for the document handling

Most meeting documents had been temporary documents only, however, and had been archived by PT SMG As they give an important insight into the technical background, ETSI,

on the initiative of PT SMG, scanned all GSM and SMG plenary documents

The regulatory basis for mobile station type approval in the European Economic Area was changed again until finally the R&TTE directive was introduced The necessary standards were created by SMG7 and PT SMG

PT SMG participated in the co-operation and liaison on dualband DECT/GSM and GSM/ Mobile Satellite Systems (MSS)

When PCS 1900 (GSM in the 1900 band) was introduced in North America, T1P1 estab-lished the corresponding standard, and a co-operation with SMG was estabestab-lished This led later to a fully integrated standard with joint approval by T1P1 and SMG PT SMG partici-pated in these efforts and the preparation of the co-operation agreements

PT SMG also managed the assessment of the Adaptive Multi Rate (AMR) codec together with SMG11

Several other special tasks were performed by PT SMG:

† A taskforce in PT SMG elaborated major parts of the necessary additions to the GSM standard for the GSM railways applications, funded by the Union Internationale des Chemins de Fer, international railways union (UIC) and European Commission

† When the GPRS taskforce, a working group installed by SMG in spring 1994 to elaborate the basic settings of GPRS, had concluded and handed over its work to the SMG STCs 1 year later, a special taskforce was established in PT SMG (STF 80V)

† PT SMG made some substantial contributions to the efficient use of the GSM broadcast channel

† There was a special taskforce on number portability in PT SMG

† PT SMG continued its function as editor and rapporteur for the GSM TTCN test specifica-tions, but participated in outsourcing the actual production of TTCN code to software houses

19.2.4 The Introduction of UMTS

Since 1996, PT SMG supported the development of UMTS as well – unfortunately, due to lack of resources with the exception of the UMTS radio access It became obvious that a global co-operation on GSM standardisation was necessary, and for the third generation this was evident PT SMG participated in the preparation of this co-operation In order to strengthen the liaison to ITU, an ITU-T co-ordinator and an ITU-R co-ordinator were installed at PT SMG, funded by member companies In 1999 and 2000, the work on UMTS and GSM was successively handed over to 3GPP and PT SMG disappeared together with SMG

Chapter 19: Professional

Technical Support and its

Evolution

Section 3: MCC in the 3GPP and ETSI Environment Adrian Scrase1

19.3.1 The Need for a Mobile Competence Centre

During the preparatory discussions that led to the creation of the Third Generation Partner-ship Project (3GPP) the need for dedicated project support had been clearly identified From the first development of mobile telephone standards within CEPT, and later through their development within ETSI, the availability of dedicated support had been attributed as one of the factors that led to the success of the GSM standard With the birth of 3GPP it was clear that such support needed to be continued

The previous sections in this chapter describe in detail how professional technical support had been provided by the CEPT Permanent Nucleus (PN) and PT SMG groups In both cases the support provided had been undeniably excellent but the creation of an international project such as 3GPP provided an opportunity to consider a fresh approach to project support History had provided one important lesson though in respect of project support, that the demands made by a technical group may be infinite, whilst the resources available to provide such support will always be subject to close scrutiny

When considering the support to be provided to 3GPP it was evident from the outset that the timescales were pressing and that support needed to be provided without delay The first technical meetings of 3GPP took place in December 1998 and some emergency measure was required to ensure that from that day forth a level of support was available When looking at the organisational partners that had created 3GPP, ETSI was the only partner that had an existing comprehensive support structure in place and to some extent it was a natural decision

to base the future support on the ETSI model However, the dimensions of 3GPP were such that considerably more resource would be required to provide the level of support expected The ETSI PT SMG, which had provided support to ETSI TC SMG, provided first level support to 3GPP from its creation, assisted by several ETSI staff members provided on a

1 The views expressed in this section are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of his affiliation entity.

GSM and UMTS: The Creation of Global Mobile Communication

Edited by Friedhelm Hillebrand Copyright q 2001 John Wiley & Sons Ltd ISBNs: 0-470-84322-5 (Hardback); 0-470-845546 (Electronic)

temporary basis This support enabled the project to get off to a good start but with the cost that resources had been diverted from other support tasks within ETSI A more permanent and equitable solution was required

19.3.2 Establishing the ETSI Mobile Competence Centre

The ETSI Mobile Competence Centre (MCC) was created in March 1999 It was formed out

of the existing PT SMG, supplemented with additional ETSI staff at both the professional and administrative level This led to an organizational unit of approximately 20 persons, placed directly under the ETSI director general

The distinct difference between this and earlier support groups was that it had been established as an organizational unit within the permanent structure of the ETSI secretariat This provided a more stable basis for the future work and moved the problems associated with funding and administration away from the technical groups and into a domain more suited to such tasks

By May 1999 the magnitude of the support requirements of 3GPP became more apparent and ETSI members responded by agreeing to an additional injection of 1.4 million euros, raising the budget allocation for MCC for 1999 to approximately 3.5 million euros This additional injection of funding led to an increase in human resources and a total complement within MCC of 25 persons

Whilst MCC had been created within a different organizational framework, many of the attributes of the former structures had been retained The use of a high proportion of contracted experts for example, is a practise that still continues within MCC since this brings

a number of benefits The contracted experts remain under the employment of their home companies and are contracted to ETSI for a fixed duration The home company receives a daily rate of remuneration for the services provided by the expert This leads to a very flexible workforce where the skill base can be changed on demand, the level of resources may be raised or lowered very easily, and where the most competent and recently trained experts can

be obtained from industry on short-term contracts There is also a considerable benefit to the home company since the experts invariably return enriched by their experience of having worked within the ETSI/3GPP environment With a project as complex as 3GPP, there is however a need for a level of permanence which is provided by a complement of staff employed within the secretariat Such staff are particularly suited to longer-term project management tasks and to the management of the specifications being produced The combi-nation of both types of human resource has led to an efficient organizational unit The ETSI secretariat also performs many tasks for the wider ETSI membership and has dedicated groups providing IT assistance, document handing expertise, accountancy services, market-ing services, etc MCC has full and easy access to all of these services

Another feature that had been retained and expanded within MCC was the international variety of the workforce By the middle of 1999, 14 different nationalities were represented within the team from four different continents This included one representative from Japan and one from South Korea both of whom had been provided on a voluntary basis by their home organisations

By the end of 1999, the importance and magnitude of the task being undertaken by MCC led to its designation as a separate department within the ETSI secretariat

19.3.3 Organising the Work

MCC contains a number of teams each providing dedicated support to a Technical Specifica-tion Group (TSG) This means that every TSG and working group has a nominated support officer Each team has a ‘‘Godfather’’ who is responsible for ensuring that the TSG as a whole receives the necessary level of support required and that the team works efficiently and effectively

The support officers are considered as project managers for the technical groups that they support and perform the following tasks:

† support meetings, prepare document list and meeting report, implement agreed actions and present results to the parent body as appropriate;

† manage major work items and update/maintain a work plan for the work item indicating the affected specifications, change requests, new specifications, specification groups, meeting schedules and milestones;

† edit specifications under change control;

† support chairpersons by undertaking administrative functions and carrying out delegated tasks;

† progress liaison statements to relevant groups;

† implement change requests approved by the parent body in the specifications under change control;

† provide the resulting new working versions of specifications under change control to the standardization group experts

The teams are helped in their work by a team of support assistants that take care of the more administrative day to day tasks The support assistants each have clearly described tasks and have nominated back-up assistants in case of absence This information, together with that pertaining to the support officers, is recorded on an intranet enabling every person within MCC to have full access to the information that they require

A task of high importance within MCC is the management of the specifications being produced by 3GPP A full-time specifications manager is allocated for this task with sibility for ensuring that the exact status is known of every specification under MCC respon-sibility At the time of writing MCC is managing approximately 1300 specifications

A high proportion of the workload for each support officer involves the implementation of changes to specifications that have been agreed by the TSGs Each change is formulated in the form of a ‘‘Change Request’’ (CR) and once agreed have to be carefully implemented within the related specification The changes may vary from a simple editorial correction to many pages of technical data and in each case a check is required to ensure that the specifica-tions as a whole retain their integrity with the implementation of the change During 2000, MCC processed more than 5700 CRs, which equates to approximately 25 changes imple-mented per working day

Another task for which dedicated resources are provided is for the project management of the 3GPP work plan Following the creation of 3GPP a new approach was considered in terms

of structuring the work plan and this has resulted in a functional decomposition of the work into three hierarchical levels; features, building blocks and work tasks A comprehensive plan has been created which lists all of the work ongoing within the project and categorises that work into one of the three categories given above Included within this categorization is an

understanding of the interdependencies that exist between each activity The result of this management process is portrayed in Gantt form and enables users to view each feature, to determine what progress has been made, and when the specifications required for that feature are likely to be completed A technical co-ordinator is appointed within MCC to manage the work plan

3GPP makes extensive use of modern IT tools and MCC plays a leading role in the development and deployment of such tools An IT co-ordinator within MCC has the task

of evaluating new tools and for developing methods to improve the efficiency of the docu-ment editing process

Since MCC is an integral part of the ETSI secretariat it is required to meet the requirements

of the ISO 9002 quality system and regularly undergoes stringent auditing to ensure that the requirements are met

Figure 19.3.1 gives a snap shot of MCC taken at the end of 2000 and shows the distribution

of work at that point in time

19.3.4 Funding Issues and Financial Control

The provision of comprehensive project support carries with it an associated cost, and with a competence centre employing more than 25 persons it is clear that the cost will be significant During the first year of operation, the vast majority of the support costs were met by the ETSI

Figure 19.3.1 MCC organisation at end of 2000