With major “5G” development news coming out of this week’s Mobile World Congress event, test company Keysight Technologies is enjoying the spotlight as a major partner in 5G research and development.
Keysight said it’s collaborating with ZTE on predeployment 5G plans in China, as well as participating in a demo with ZTE in which a ZTE device is said to have achieved one-gigabit per second IP data throughput. The company also is working with Samsung on designing and deploying 5G devices for early operator trials, noting it has been cooperating closely with Samsung since September 2016, to “align their respective product portfolios around the specification and build an ecosystem of interoperable products.”
“As we begin to transition to a new generation of wireless technologies, it’s growing more important that we establish industry alignment,” said Woojune Kim, VP of next-generation strategy at Samsung, in a statement. “With 5G, this is more important than ever as we’re tapping into an area of the radio spectrum that has been a big unknown for the mobile industry. Being able to work closely with Keysight and leveraging their expertise with network simulation, [radio frequency] and millimeter wave technologies is an advantage for our product validation efforts.”
In some of its other 5G work in the spotlight this week, Keysight said it conducted the first integration tests with Huawei’s 5G prototype base station and is working with the company on the second phase of 5G research testing in China led by the IMT-2020 Promotion Group. The first phase of tests, completed in 2016, centered around verifying certain aspects of 5G technology. The second phase is considered “technical program validation” and started in the second half of 2016. That testing is focused on the “verification and validation of wireless air interface and networking technologies used in the four major 5G scenarios: continuous broad coverage; hot spot high capacity; ultra-reliable, low-latency communications; and massive connection,” Keysight said.
“The tests have already started and are scheduled to be completed by the end of 2017,” The company stated, adding it will participate in the RF and functional test areas in seven test scenarios, including numerology, frame structure, a new waveform and coding schemes.
Keysight positioned itself as an early enabler of 5G research and development, particularly with major Asia-Pacific players. Prior to its spin off from Agilent in 2014, Keysight was inking 5G collaboration deals with China Mobile and KT in 2015. Keysight is also a member of the $400 million Advanced Wireless Research Initiative and last year joined the Next Generation Mobile Network Alliance after the NGMN Alliance outlined plans to focus on 5G testing and architectures to support carriers in their network evolution.
