YOU ARE AT:Test and MeasurementTest and Measurement: Airspan tests Open RAN, 5G interoperability in CBRS

Test and Measurement: Airspan tests Open RAN, 5G interoperability in CBRS

Airspan Networks says it has successfully conducted 5G and Open RAN interoperability in CBRS spectrum, including establishing 5G calls, data upload and download tests, link adaption, the ability of the system to recover from a radio link failure and mobility tests.

The interoperability tests used a mobile test device with a Snapdragon X60 5G modem-RF system, connected to Airspan’s Open RAN 5G platform (OpenRANGE), including Radio Units (RUs), Distributed Units (DUs) and Centralized Units (CUs). Airspan said that the test set-up included its AirVelocity indoor solution and AirSpeed outdoor solution, and that the testing covered both lab and over-the-air field trials.

“This 5G milestone using the Snapdragon X60 5G Modem-RF System in the CBRS n48 bandwill help enable the full capabilities of 5G,” said Sanjeev Athalye, senior director of product management at Qualcomm Technologies. “This achievement will pave the way for the development of mobile devices leveraging CBRS spectrum for consumer and enterprise use cases.”

In other test news:

-Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and their collaborators have developed a new method for detecting flaws in transistors, which NIST notes has become more challenging as transistor dimensions become “almost unimaginably small” while switching speeds have become very fast. “For some promising semiconductor materials in development — such as silicon carbide (SiC) instead of silicon (Si) alone for novel high-energy, high-temperature devices — there has been no simple and straightforward way to characterize defects in detail,” NIST said in a post about the new reseach, which was published this week in the Journal of Applied Physics.

“The method we developed works with both traditional Si and SiC, allowing us for the first time to identify not only the type of defect but the number of them in a given space with a simple DC measurement,” said James Ashton of NIST, who conducted the research with colleagues at NIST and Pennsylvania State University.

“We wanted to provide manufacturers with a way to identify and quantify defects as they are testing different new materials,” said NIST co-author Jason Ryan. “We did that by creating a physics model of a defect-detection technique that has been widely used but poorly understood until now. We then conducted proof-of-principle experiments that confirmed our model.”

Read more details about the new NIST research here.

NI has a new CTO. Thomas Benjamin has been appointed as executive vice president, CTO and head of product analytics. Benjamin was most recently the CTO and SVP of Technology at SAP Ariba, and his carrier has also spanned CTO and VP roles at General Electric and Emirates Group, and technology leadership roles at Visa, Walmart, and Oracle.

In addition, NI has promoted Scott Rust to EVP of platforms and products.

NXP is using solutions from Keysight Technologies to develop 5G Fixed Wireless Access customer premise equipment for both 5G NonStandalone and Standalone implementations. Keysight also made two announcements this week related to various aspects of network security and monitoring: A new platform for validating network traffic scale and cybersecurity capabilities within hyperscale data centers, and new tools for utility networks, including a network packet broker and taps for network monitoring.

“While the threat of cyberattacks have kept IT security teams awake for the past forty years, the Ukraine power plant hack in 2015 was the first real wake up call for OT teams around the world,” said Taran Singh, VP of enterprise solutions at Keysight. “OT networks are increasingly interconnected with IT networks expanding the OT attack surface. As cybersecurity attacks escalate against critical infrastructures, industrial operators, such as electric utilities, need technology to monitor the cybersecurity of both their OT and IT environments.”

Keysight’s new APS platform is intended for network equipment manufacturers and data centers operators, to validate equipment that supports massive data volume and cybersecurity requirements. “Piecing together test systems to push new hyperscale data center devices to their limits has become cost prohibitive and unmanageable. This is especially true for simulating encrypted traffic and massive data sets like elephant flows found in artificial intelligence and machine learning use-cases,” said Ram Periakaruppan, VP and GM of Keysight’s Network Test and Security Solutions group. “Keysight’s APS Series delivers a new approach — a single application and security test platform — that modularly scales to double the encryption throughput per rack unit of the nearest competitor.”

ABOUT AUTHOR

Kelly Hill
Kelly Hill
Kelly reports on network test and measurement, as well as the use of big data and analytics. She first covered the wireless industry for RCR Wireless News in 2005, focusing on carriers and mobile virtual network operators, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository. Follow her on Twitter: @khillrcr