Certification Testing

Test and certify 5G radios

The certification of wireless radios is another popular use case, particularly devices that will support 5G.

The RF conductive test setup shown here emulates an outdoor LTE/5G wireless environment, with a 5G/LTE Radio and user devices or a UE simulator. This RF environment can be adapted for testing any other wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee etc. as well.

The radios under test are connected to High-Power attenuators, then into a programmable attenuator and multi-channel programmable switch. Finally the signal is routed to a commercial UE emulator. The High-Power attenuator allows the user to independently power down the power level of the High-power 5G/LTE Radios. Spectrum Control’s multi-channel programmable attenuator simulates the fading loss between the radios and the user devices/UE simulator. Each programmable attenuator can be programmed continually to different values in a sequence, or even step between random values, replicating signal loss in a wireless environment. The Spectrum Control Multi-channel Programmable Switch will enable the user to connect multiple radios to multiple user-devices and control signal coordination
to the devices under test. Radio Certification testing can be broken down into a number of sub tests as follows:

• Throughput
• Forwarding rate
• Packet Error and Jitter Rate
• Data rate adaptation
• Associated capacity
• Receiver Performance

This test environment includes Spectrum Control’s digital Lab assistant to help manage test automation for “out of the box” testing supporting secure remote operation and control through web, Telnet and TCP/IP interfaces. With the addition of Spectrum Control Smart Power Distribution Subsystem, you can create a full "lights-out" lab that enables both RF testing and power control of the test platform and connected devices.