About Hytera Mobilfunk GmbH

Hytera Mobilfunk GmbH is a German provider and manufacturer of mission-critical communication solutions. The company offers solutions which provide customers from public safety organisations, as well as from industrial, supply and transport companies, with highly available and secure radio communication. As a well-known specialist in mobile radio technology such as TETRA, LTE and DMR, the company has been a pioneer in professional mobile radio systems for 40 years. Hytera Mobilfunk GmbH is part of Hytera Communications Co. Ltd., which has a worldwide network of 60 subsidiaries and branches on every continent and employs more than 9,000 people.

"We are using HiveMQ in a country wide public safety network with 2400 publishers providing up to 2500 messages/second to central network management applications in near real time..."

Gerald Nolte, CTO at Hytera Mobilfunk

ACCESSNET^®-T IP uses HiveMQ for reliable and secure messaging

The IP based product ACCESSNET^®-T IP includes hardware and software components to build up radio communication networks according to the ETSI¹ TETRA standard, which is used wherever reliability and security in radio communication are critical requirements, e.g. police, fire brigades, industry or public transport customers. ACCESSNET^®-T IP consists of intelligent base stations handling all radio communication in a network cell and centrally hosted network management applications, such as radio subscriber management, infrastructure monitoring and system configuration management. In addition to all its functional capabilities, ACCESSNET^®-T IP supports hardware and software redundancy, encrypted communication, secure authentication and audit trailing.

In close cooperation with HiveMQ’s engineers, the HiveMQ MQTT broker was introduced into the product to collect information on the technical status, capacity and radio user operations from all base stations in a communications system in near real time. This allows customers to monitor the availability and usage of the communication services and to enable additional capacity if needed – even automatically by an algorithm considering the radio frequencies already used in the range of the base station.

HiveMQ in large public safety networks

“We are using HiveMQ in a country wide public safety network with 2400 publishers providing up to 2500 messages/second to central network management applications in near real time using encrypted communication, LDAP authentication of clients and redundancy to fulfill the customer’s very high security and availability demands", Gerald Nolte, CTO at Hytera Mobilfunk explains.

In contrast to the widely used SNMP based communication in telecommunication networks, the MQTT broker using extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging provides more flexibility, so that access to selected information in the network stored in MQTT topics can even be granted to customer applications using the HiveMQ authorization mechanisms. By using retained messages for important status information, new clients connecting the broker immediately get the latest status without information polling.

“In earlier versions of the product, we just collected status information and statistics counters using SNMP with rather long polling cycles. With MQTT, we now see status changes immediately and can even automate network management reactions.”

Another key argument for using MQTT in ACCESSNET^®-T IP was that it offers the flexibility of providing many specialized clients with exactly the data they need without affecting the bandwidth of the communication links to the base stations.

Gerald Nolte adds: “After successful prototyping with open source MQTT implementations, such as Eclipse Mosquitto, we selected HiveMQ as the most reliable, secure and scaleable product on the market.”

¹ European Telecommunications Standards Institute