Rohde & Schwarz has laid claim to being the first in the industry with PTCRB-validated IMS conformance test cases for 5G New Radio, which can be used for PTCRB certification testing.
R&S said that the validated test cases “[pave]the way for 5G IMS conformance testing.” IMS conformance testing is part of the overall test regime that mobile devices must undergo as part of device certification by the PTCRB or Global Certification Forum.
The test company also recently unveiled new models of three-path diode power sensors with a maximum measurable frequency of 67 GHz, which R&S says is unmatched in the industry and supports high-speed power measurements for short-distance millimeter-wave terrestrial links, 802.11ay and 802.11ad WiGig Wireless LAN, and satellite-to-satellite links operating at 60 GHz.
Rohde also touted a deeper partnership with AVL focused on integrating R&S radar testing capabilities into vehicle-in-the-loop testing in order to assess and validate vehicle’s Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), which typically rely on radar for detection and guidance. An R&S radar system is being integrated into AVL’s DrivingCube in-the-loop system, and the rest company said that this “opens up a completely new range of possibilities for testing radar-enabled ADAS features and ensuring the safety of autonomous driving functions with vehicle-in-the-loop test beds.” The radar system, it added, “allows complex artificial objects to be generated for the radar sensors at variable distances and with variable radial velocity, size and azimuth – without physically moving antennas or devices.” The system is also modular, Rohde said, so that the same test bed can be used for testing various vehicle and radar sensor types and features including adaptive cruise control and lane keeping assist, among others.
And speaking of radar, if you have a Facebook account, a sponsored Facebook post from Rohde & Schwarz that offers a free pocket radar guide has garnered more than 150 funny and/or very confused comments as it wended its way through people’s feeds over the past year — most of them, apparently, not RF engineers and puzzled as to why they were served such a specific ad. (One commenter jokingly calls the guide “A real ice-breaker at parties.” “My frequency allocation chart brings all the boys to the yard. …” chimed in another.)
In other test news:
–Ookla has ranked AT&T as the fastest U.S. mobile network operator during the fourth quarter of 2020, followed by T-Mobile US, Sprint’s former network (Ookla is still ranking T-Mo and Sprint’s networks separately) and Verizon Wireless in fourth place. There is a difference of about 10 points between AT&T’s score and Verizon’s. It’s a surprising result for Verizon, which prides itself on its network prowess — but the widespread turn-up of 4G/5G Dynamic Spectrum Sharing to expand 5G network availability appears to have impacted the carrier’s overall network speed. When Ookla analyzed only speedtests taken over a 5G connection, AT&T again came out on top, with Verizon in last place.
“This large drop in performance for Verizon Wireless is to be expected as the network expanded dramatically over the past quarter, a process that included using dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) to expand from mmWave-only to sub-6 GHz 5G and the addition of many new users over a broader footprint — both of which tend to bring down average performance,” Ookla said.
–Keysight Technologies said that Open RAN vendor Radisys is using the test company’s edge-to-core portfolio to establish a test lab that focuses on O-RAN specification compliance and interoperability between network elements. The two companies report that they have already achieved combined downlink and uplink data throughput speeds of more than two Gbps in TDD mode in sub-6GHz spectrum, using Keysight’s test equipment and Radisys’ O-RAN infrastructure.
Radisys is leveraging Keysight’s user equipment emulation solution platform, its radio unit simulator, its Propsim channel emulators and its Open RAN Studio software to “validate the performance of distributed units and central units under real-world scenarios across the full protocol stack.”
-Meanwhile, cloud-native network software company Mavenir is working with Viavi Solutions on lab validation of its Radio Access Network solutions for the U.S. market. Ramnik Kamo, Mavenir’s EVP of quality, systems and people, said that Viavi “has been a highly collaborative partner with our two companies’ engineering teams working together to prove a new technology against very tight customer timescales.”
“As vendors across the industry develop open, cloud-native and disaggregated architectures, testing against user expectations of service quality will be critical to accelerate adoption at scale,” said Luiz Cesar Oliveira, VP of the Americas at Viavi.
–Empirix highlighted its success in helping the Center for Excellence in Higher Education migrate to an all-in-one cloud-native contact center to support call center employees working from home. Empirix enabled the company to emulate 17,000 inbound calls from students to more than 500 remote staff, and to isolate and resolve call blocks and low voice quality as the call volumes increased.
“This was the smoothest launch of ANY system deployment that I’ve been a part of,” said Shane Triplett, dialer administrator of CEHE, in an emphatic statement. “Historically, our testing efforts have been manual and produced inaccurate results that we didn’t trust. Empirix finished their testing in the same amount of time it would have taken us to create a manual test plan.”
-The global GNSS simulator market is expected to grow at more than 9% annually through 2025, according to a new report from Markets & Markets. The GNSS simulator market will rise in value from about $106 million in 2020 to $165 million by 2025, the report says, driven by the increasing penetration of consumer IoT devices and wearable devices that utilize location information; 5G will also contribute to the market’s growth, because of the desire for both ubiquitous connectivity and accurate location. “5G/GNSS will be the core of future location engines for many applications,” the report said.
–Accedian is partnering with cyber security company UnderDefense on a new suite of “cyber resiliency” solutions, services and consulting that includes 24/7 monitoring of network traffic. The partnership promises to deliver “unrivaled end-to-end hybrid enterprise and cloud infrastructure observability, continuous monitoring of network traffic for insights into anomalous behavior, responsive action to incidents, and cyber resiliency consulting.”
“Companies have invested in tools, but have underinvested in security integration, testing, training, and automation within IT ecosystems for comprehensive cyber resiliency during the last twenty-four months,” said Nazar Tymoshyk, CEO and founder of UnderDefense, in a statement. “Instead they have rushed to deploy cloud applications across private, hybrid, multi-operator and multi-cloud infrastructure, leaving their security posture exposed. Accedian and UnderDefense have invested heavily to bring greater speed of reaction, discovery, and threat mitigation to both give control back to CIOs and to provide our clients with a dynamically-adaptive Detection & Response, IR, and Ethical Hacking framework. You can invest in solutions like MDR, a SIEM, or a SOC, but you’re buying technology without context if you don’t address cyber resiliency through a business continuity lens and incorporate network based threat analytics.”
