06 TETRASUPPLEMENT
David Chater-Lea Chairman ETSI TC TETRA WG4
Developments in the TETRA standard for advanced data
TETRA – Terrestrial Trunked Radio – is standardised in ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute) to enable a competitive, interoperable market for digital Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) equipment. Although designed with the requirements of the European market in mind, TETRA has found world-wide adoption and is present in more than 117 countries around the globe with over 2.5 million terminals sold.
The standard was built on requirements from the entire PMR industry to serve a variety of markets – Public Safety, Transport, Industrial and Commercial users – and because of this wide range of inputs, TETRA offers probably the richest functionality of any published digital radio communications standard in existence. However, the most important features which make it attractive in these professional markets are the high performance group and individual voice communications services and its full integration with a variety of data services, so that one radio terminal can provide many services – for example voice communications with drivers, emergency announcements to passengers, exchange of telemetry and signalling data and so on. TETRA has been particularly successful in the
transport industry because of its integrated services, because the highly competitive marketplace with a variety of different terminal devices on offer, and because it offers economical radio coverage in UHF frequencies. It can be found in metro systems, bus systems and even main line rail systems around the world.
TETRA – continuous development The original Release 1 of the TETRA standard by ETSI was published in the mid 1990s. However,
Eurotransport Volume 9, Issue 3, 2011
the TETRA standard has not been static since then – far from it. The Technical Committee responsible for TETRA in ETSI (TC TETRA) remains active today, to continuously develop TETRA to
construct the standard. Specialist working groups who have particular expertise in protocols, in data and in security write the standards which are then thoroughly reviewed within the TETRA community, and through a wider Public Enquiry via National Standards Organisations before publication as European standards. The TETRA standard provides the
TETRA has found world-wide adoption and is present in more than 117 countries with over 2.5 million terminals sold
keep pace with the needs of the industries that it serves. Updates to the standard are regularly published by ETSI as the technology is enhanced. Standards development is a user driven
process. Requirements for new standardisation work are collected through a users’ working group and through workshops, and are then passed to technical working groups who
foundations on which applications for different markets are built. It is the enabler, with standardised speech and data services and standardised interfaces to terminal equipment, for the applications which serve markets such as the transport market. Applications and further services are standardised on top of TETRA, and the TETRA Association Technical Forum has written a range of specifications which both provide interoperability at the TETRA service level, and also which offer further services using TETRA’s data capabilities. Examples of these are the Location Information Protocol, which is a standardised exchange format for location data and on which applications that track bus movement and positions can be built, and the Radio User Assignment protocol which allows users or roles to be associated to radios, allowing a bus or train radio to be called directly by running number or route.
Data development The development of data services is probably the most important aspect of ETSI TC TETRA’s work for the transport market. Efficient data transfer is the key to developing applications which allow intelligent positioning systems, passenger
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