Rohde & Schwarz said it has become the first T&M equipment supplier to offer a test solution for 3GPP LTE uplink with MIMO technology.
In release 10 for LTE-Advanced, the 3GPP has specified that user equipment with MIMO technology will be able to use up to four antennas to transmit data in the uplink to the mobile radio network. In the downlink, up to eight parallel data streams are provided for. MIMO allows the capacity of the LTE network to be expanded even further. Currently, 3GPP LTE only uses MIMO in the downlink with four parallel data streams. Until now, transmission of only one data stream was possible in the uplink.
Chipset developers can use the new software option to directly test whether the LTE uplink MIMO function is correctly implemented in the device under test. A setup consisting of two Rohde & Schwarz signal analyzers connected to a PC is used to test two antennas of the device under test simultaneously. This allows users to verify the MIMO precoding. The software analyzes the data streams and their distribution among the antennas according to the matrix multiplication defined by 3GPP. This also makes it possible to verify the time correlation between the antenna signals.
The R&S FS-K103PC option for use with signal and spectrum analyzers of the R&S FSW, R&S FSV, R&S FSVR, R&S FSG and R&S FSQ series is now available from Rohde & Schwarz.