Aeroflex Limited announced that the industry-standard TM500 LTE-A Single UE Test Mobile has added support for 3GPP Release 10 (Rel-10) Transmission Mode 9 (TM9), which allows enhanced network capability and performance by flexible use of MIMO with minimum additional overhead.
As demand grows for LTE-A, engineers developing and testing base stations (eNodeB) need to be able to verify network performance against the latest 3GPP specifications as soon as they are introduced. The TM500 LTE-A Test Mobile tracks the 3GPP roadmap, providing a fully software-upgradeable path from functional single user equipment (UE) test, through multi-UE, to load testing based on the emulation of thousands of UEs working in multiple cells. TM9 is the latest step in this roadmap, enabling the testing of 3GPP Release 10 enhancements including the potential for higher order MIMO and beamforming.
The TM500 LTE-A Test Mobile is based on the industry-standard TM500 platform, which is already used by all the world’s major infrastructure vendors and most small cell vendors. With TM9 support, the TM500 LTE-A Single-UE Test Mobile now allows testing of key TM9 features in a single-cell configuration, allowing its functional performance to be verified. The TM500 provides demodulation of downlink (DL) data based on the demodulation reference signal (DMRS) and calculation of channel state information (CSI) feedback from the UE. This information consists of the Pre-coding Matrix Indicator (PMI), Rank Indicator (RI), and Channel Quality Indicator (CQI), which are based on the newly-introduced reference signal (CSI-RS).
Logging of both Rel-10 related protocol messages and power levels of these newly-defined reference signals, CSI-RS and DMRS, has been added, to ease debugging of the feature.
Aeroflex
www.aeroflex.com