The Canadian government introduced new spectrum licensing rules through Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), allowing private 5G networks, with licenses issued under a Non-Competitive Licensing (NCL) model.
To simulate a handover, testers must precisely control RF signal strengths from two or more sites simultaneously. Techniques such as MIMO and Carrier Aggregation (CA) combine multiple RF signals together to improve network performance, but testers must manipulate many different signals simultaneously to properly simulate a single handover.
One of the biggest issues seen in RF labs is the need to share expensive and limited test resources among a larger group of testers. Ideally, all testers would have their own, dedicated test equipment. However, much of this equipment is very expensive so this isn’t really a practical approach in most labs.
Many operators rely heavily on emulation as part of a reasonable testing strategy. However, emulation, even when done at scale, doesn't accurately reflect the real-world environment and makes too many assumptions about network configuration that don't represent that operator's specific implementation.
To facilitate test automation each resource in the system is controlled by the orchestration layer and configured according to the scenario being tested. Here we're showing the 5G core, higher levels of RAN, the CU/DU splits, the RRUs, and the devices under test.
In this blog post we are going to review three configuration examples of lab architecture that mirror the production environment of a mobile network. The first is an operator who wants to be able to test their two-vendor 4G implementation in the lab, where each vendor uses two different configurations.
The RF Test Position solution is an off-the-shelf product launched and released in late 2022 and features one of many solutions that can be derived from the LAMTA orchestration platform. Popularity of the solution increased after the COVID-19 pandemic forced lab managers to maintain business continuity without having staff on site.