Rohde & Schwarz and Elektrobit to Demo HPUE Test

February 20, 2014. At Mobile World Congress, Rohde & Schwarz and Elektrobit (EB) will team up to present a live demonstration of HPUE (high-power user equipment) testing. With the recent firmware release, the R&S CMW500 wideband radio communication tester from Rohde & Schwarz now supports HPUE tests. The Elektrobit HPUE demonstrator is the first device able to transmit at the high output power of +31 dBm as intended for operation in Band 14. In this demonstration the R&S CMW500 emulates an LTE Band 14 network, in which the Elektrobit DUT registers. The R&S CWMrun sequencer software controls the entire setup to run all required transmitter and receiver tests, including the newly added higher output power test cases, to verify user equipment (UE) transmitter performance.

Jani Lyrintzis, Vice President, Business Development and Sales, Elektrobit said, “High-power user equipment capability will be important especially during the early phases of FirstNet network rollouts when coverage is limited. Adding this capability quickly on top of EB’s specialized device platform nicely demonstrates the platform’s modularity and scalability, while increasing its attractiveness and use case and customer potential.”

With LTE becoming the global wireless communications standard for delivering mobile broadband data and high-definition voice, and soon also offering public safety features, governmental authorities in the United States have decided to adopt the LTE standard for critical communications. There, FirstNet is currently in charge of deploying, maintaining, and servicing a dedicated LTE-based network for reliable communications for first and second responders. LTE Band 14 was made available for this undertaking. The public safety network will be based on a 2×10-MHz spectrum allocation.

Traditionally, critical communications and commercial communications use different technologies and standards. Public safety features, such as group call and device-to-device communications, are usually not supported by commercial communications systems. However, 3GPP is working on Release 12, scheduled for the end of 2014, which will bring these important public safety enhancements to the LTE standard.

3GPP Release 11 has added an important feature that allows LTE devices intended for Band 14 to transmit at a higher output power of +31 dBm. This helps to extend coverage since commercial LTE devices can only transmit at a maximum power of +23 dBm. When using high output power, it is important to prove that first responder devices do not interfere with any adjacent commercial LTE networks using frequencies around Band 14. Eight new RF conformance test cases have been added to the relevant technical specifications to test these interference scenarios. The R&S CMW500 wideband radio communication tester already supports all these conformance tests according to 3GPP standard TS 36.521 Part 1.

With their joint demonstration, Rohde & Schwarz and Elektrobit are paving the way to get LTE ready for public safety applications. The test setup at Mobile World Congress is located at the main Rohde & Schwarz booth, stand C40 in Hall 6.

Rohde & Schwarz, www.rohde-schwarz.com

Elektrobit (EB), www.elektrobit.com