Agilent Technologies has launched new software options for two of its T4000S test systems for user equipment developers that support LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation test cases defined by 3GPP.
The options for the T4010S LTE RF and T4020S LTE RRM test systems provide coverage for assessing user equipment performance and behavior pre-deployment, in a carrier aggregation environment. Agilent said that one major North American network operator has already verified and adopted the CA testing abilities. The new enhancements involve several MIMO and fading tests with two downlink component carriers in a single instrument.
Joe DePong, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s mobile broadband operation, said in a statement that “Carrier aggregation represents the immediate future of LTE-Advanced cellular deployments.”
—Anite has been appointed to lead the radio channel modelling task group within the Mobile and wireless communications Enablers for the 2020 Information Society (METIS). METIS is a consortium of 28 wireless industry players, co-funded by the European Commission, with the objective of laying the foundation for 5G wireless systems that can cope with large growth in mobile data consumption and the ‘Internet of Things’ with a wide range of connected devices.
METIS participants, including Anite, have so far defined five 5G scenarios that reflect the challenges for wireless communications standards of the future, and used those scenarios to come up with general requirements that the standards would need to support; one of which is one thousand times more mobile data per area compared to today’s average traffic. The radio channel modelling task group is expected to publish its first work in April 2014.
—Anritsu has a new high-sensitivity error detector (ED) for its MP1800A BERT signal quality analyzer that supports multichannel BER measurements up to 32.1Gbit/s. The new ED, configured with the signal quality analyzer, is designed for verifying that high-speed backplanes, cables and interconnects meet undustry standards such as 100GBASE-SR4 and -KR4. Users can choose one, two of four-channel inputs, with up to eight channels supported by adding more modules.
Anritsu also introduced a 32 Gbit/s extension option for its MP1825B 4Tap Emphasis, which can also be configured with the MP1800A BERT signal quality analyzer in order to measure performance of high-speed interconnects used in Next-Generation Network (NGN) applications.
