Wireless labs can often have many Remote Radio Units or Remote Radio Heads (RRUs/RRHs) to manage. To conduct testing, these RF ports are connected to RF attenuation equipment before being routed to RF testing stations.
Mobile carriers have invested considerably in deploying 5G New Radio (NR) and 5G standalone (SA) networks. One of the most promising features of 5G Standalone (SA) to help monetize new services for subscribers is Network Slicing.
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.