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.