At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Rohde & Schwarz demonstrated new functions of the R&S CMW500, its wideband radio communication tester. These new functions help the wireless communications industry achieve timely commercial implementation of new features such as carrier aggregation for LTE-Advanced and VoLTE as well as enhancements to the 3G standard.
Carrier aggregation allows network operators to combine frequency bands with different bandwidths in order to better optimize the frequency spectrum for higher data rates. In the future, it will be possible to realize up to five component carriers with 20 MHz bandwidth each in the downlink and uplink.
Using the R&S CMW500, manufacturers can now test different carrier aggregation scenarios. It is the first tester to perform tests with three component carriers in the downlink. It can also test two component carriers in the uplink. The R&S CMW500 delivers the performance required for end-to-end tests on category 6 (Cat6) chipsets and smartphones. Tests are carried out under realistic conditions since downlink carrier aggregation with 2x2 MIMO, including 3GPP fading profiles, can be performed with a single instrument. This makes it the ideal platform for development tests, carrier acceptance tests and protocol conformance tests, both for FDD and TDD.
For VoLTE testing, Rohde & Schwarz presented a new turnkey solution that simultaneously verifies voice quality and analyzes how a VoLTE connection affects the lifetime of smartphone batteries. In this setup, the R&S CMW500 shows current drain monitoring over time during the VoLTE connection. The R&S UPV audio analyzer analyzes the audio quality based on POLQA algorithms. The solution is fully automated thanks to the R&S CMWrun sequencer software, making it easy for developers to verify how different applications affect battery lifetime.
Rohde & Schwarz has also enhanced its test solutions for the 3G standard, which continues to coexist with LTE. The R&S CMW500features new options for testing DC HSUPA with two carriers in the uplink in line with 3GPP Rel. 9. Because it already supports DC HSDPA, users can now test both technologies in combination. The DUT is able to transmit data to the tester in the uplink in an end-to-end connection while simultaneously receiving data in the downlink. These throughput rates can be verified in Layer 1, the RLC layer and the IP layer.
The R&S CMW500 wideband radio communication tester also supports other transmission modes such as SISO, MIMO 2x2, MIMO 4x2 and MIMO 8x2 as well as cellular and noncellular standards such as LTE, WCDMA, GSM, CDMA2000, TD-SCDMA, WLAN and Bluetooth®.
