National Instruments is collaborating with Samsung Electronics to develop test equipment for 5G New Radio (NR). The first public demonstration of this collaboration will show Samsung’s 28 GHz base station communicating with an NI test UE (User Equipment) at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018 in Barcelona.
The 3GPP officially released a first draft of the 5G NR standard in December 2017. An important next step in the formation of a new 5G ecosystem calls for equipment and device manufacturers to test their implementations that conform to this standard with each other to achieve the goal of interoperability. Interoperability device testing (IODT) determines whether the base station and device can establish and maintain a robust communication link capable of achieving 5G performance in prescribed test conditions.
To that end, NI and Samsung have agreed to collaborate on IODT in which Samsung’s 5G NR-capable commercial base station connects with a test UE developed by NI at 28 GHz over the air and in real time. The NI test UE exchanges messages with the base station to establish a link and then validates the downlink functionality and performance as dictated by the 3GPP. The test UE uses NI’s 28 GHz mmWave Transceiver System with a compliant 5G NR Phase 1 protocol stack developed using LabVIEW system design software.
This collaboration will explore the 5G NR standard at maximum throughput levels utilizing the full available bandwidth and maximum number of component carriers (eight) in a full 2 x 2 multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) configuration.
The NI and Samsung demonstration will be shown in Samsung’s booth at MWC.
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