Vendors address carrier aggregation for LTE-Advanced

Vendors including Agilent Technologies, Aeroflex, Anritsu, and Spirent Communications have recently made news with regard to the test of LTE-Advanced carrier-aggregation technology.

Carrier aggregation helps carriers meet wireless uplink and downlink data-rate requirements for data-hungry applications and services—even when the carriers lack sufficient contiguous bandwidth to meet demand.

Carrier aggregation (CA) involves combining multiple component carriers (CC). The aggregated carriers can be intra-band contiguous or noncontiguous (for example, all CCs reside in band 1) or inter-band noncontiguous (for example, some CCs reside in band 1 while another resides in band 2), depending on operator frequency-allocation scenarios. 3GPP offers a concise summary.

Spirent's efforts have centered on support for carrier-aggregation testing on its CS8 Mobile Device Tester. CS8’s direct access to the LTE protocol stack offers flexibility and configurability in carrier aggregation testing across all protocol layers, from PHY/MAC to RRC and RRM. Additionally, CS8 is able to support all LTE frequency bands in a single box with multiple bandwidth combinations. CS8 targets at research and development of cellular phones, tablets, data cards, and machine-to-machine cellular modules.

“Meaningful testing of carrier aggregation needs much more than a radio-channel emulation solution,” said Brock Butler, mobile device testing architect at Spirent. “It also requires the ability to readily create the protocol interactions that can exercise the mobile device’s ability to manage all possible combinations of carrier-aggregation scenarios.” (Click here for more.)

Anritsu has announced its first LTE-Advanced carrier-aggregation test-case submissions to RAN5, demonstrating protocol-conformance-test capability that extends across 2G, 3G, and LTE technology. The submissions follow Anritsu's recent validation RF-conformance test cases for carrier aggregation in PTCRB. RAN5 verification paves the way for protocol test validations and the inclusion of this technology in GCF and PTCRB certification. Anritsu says its ME7834 Mobile Device Test Platform (MDTP) has been established as a leading platform for GCF- and PTCRB-validated LTE test cases since 2011. (Click here for more.)

For its part, Aeroflex last month announced the launch of its TM500 Multi-UE LTE-A Test Mobile, which supports carrier aggregation across multiple mobile terminals or user equipment (UE). “Carrier aggregation has already been available for the Single-UE TM500 for over a year,” said Shusina Ngwa, product manager at Aeroflex. “Once cellular infrastructure vendors have verified carrier aggregation capability with a single mobile terminal they need to use the TM500 LTE-A Test Mobile to emulate real network traffic with multiple terminals at an early stage, ahead of the widespread availability of real LTE-A terminals and handsets.” (Click here for more.)

Carrier-aggregation test capability was one highlight of Agilent’s exhibit at the June International Microwave Symposium. The company demonstrated signal generation and analysis capabilities, which included one-button functionality for LTE/LTE-Advanced inter-band and intra-band carrier-aggregation measurements. (Click here for more.)