Signalion reacts on Vodafone’s call to speed-up LTE development
During 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin warned industry to work faster to beat WiMAX [1]. This wake-up call has led to much development activities in the cellular wireless communication business. Many infrastructure manufacturers have increased their development activities on that standard significantly. This is natural, since this wireless infrastructure industry has to serve the upcoming standards first. Mobile phones usually come much later. Hence during that development phase no mobile phone is available to test the base stations conformance with the standard. Therefore test user equipments (UE) with special testing capabilities are needed.
With Sorbas110 Signalion provides a first-time test solution for LTE-basestations. Sorbas110 is a prototype user equipment (UE) that enables base station developers to test their designs against a reference receiver and transmitter already in stage where the 3GPP-LTE standard is not finalized. Software Defined Radio (SDR) concepts enable the system to keep up with standard changes continuously. A scalable hardware platform with a 4 channel RF-front-end delivers the processing power needed for advanced technologies such as MIMO, Beamforming, and HARQ. The current implementation focuses on layer 1 and 2. The support of layer 3 functionalities is foreseen for the future.
At the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona Signalion has demonstrated a live video transmission using the 3GPP-LTE test UE Sorbas110 together with the LTE solutions from Rohde & Schwarz as well as with an LTE base station prototype. Signalion’s LTE test UE was the only commercially available test UE solution at the 3GSM World.
Signalion announces a standard-conform LTE-test UE before the end of the year to support the tough timeline set by Vodafone.