The CARTES SESAMES Awards presented on Monday, November 3rd 2014, in Paris rewarded the industry’s best innovations. The award in the category “Manufacturing & Test” was given to COMPRION’s OTAbility test solution honoring the need for testing all involved elements of the OTA communication chain and its use cases beyond what is covered by conformance tests.

The emerging NFC ecosystem produces an increasing use of provisioning and service maintenance over the air. The OTA communication chain involves some components which are highly decentralized in the hands of millions of consumers. A failure of one single component may pose extensive replacement costs or image loss. Therefore, testing these components is vital to all participants of the NFC ecosystem, e.g. network operators, vendors of mobile equipment, UICCs, secure elements, chipsets, trusted service manager (TSM) servers, services and applications as well as test houses.

COMPRION’s OTAbility constitutes a lab test environment for common OTA communication use cases applying remote file management (RFM) and remote application management (RAM). The test system observes and manipulates the communication chain between one or more TSM servers and a secure element placed or embedded into some mobile equipment. It facilitates over-the-air communication by simulating a radio access network. The setup makes it possible to replace various real world components by simulations, thus focusing on testing either the secure element with its applications or the mobile equipment. This product is the first and only of its kind, replacing former field test procedures and moving them into the controlled environment of a test lab, making test results reproducible and reliable. Components can be tested within an integrated system rather than separately. Thus, the solution makes it possible to test according to well-known ETSI, 3GPP and GlobalPlatform standards and is also able to simulate and test concrete use cases.

Henning Moeller, Product Manager at COMPRION: “We are very proud to receive this price as it shows that the industry has recognized the vital need and challenges for OTA testing. To some, testing seems to be unspectacular but without testing, the best technology in theory is not worth a dime in practice.”

For more information, please visit www.comprion.com