The Canadian government introduced new spectrum licensing rules through Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), allowing private 5G networks, with licenses issued under a Non-Competitive Licensing (NCL) model.
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.
In this blog post we are going to review three configuration examples of lab architecture that mirror the production environment of a mobile network. The first is an operator who wants to be able to test their two-vendor 4G implementation in the lab, where each vendor uses two different configurations.
With the advent of software-centric applications, CI/CD methodologies and continuous testing workflows were introduced to improve end-user applications and experiences. Could these same principles and methods be used to test things that are not virtual - like parts of 5G RAN?
Mobile networks are rapidly becoming more like IT networks and Mobile Network Operators will need to adapt their testing and deployment processes accordingly. Technologies like 5G and Open RAN present fundamentally new challenges and traditional testing approaches are no longer enough.
The typical mobile network is more complicated today than ever before. More frequency bands are in use with different propagation characteristics, multiple radio access technologies used simultaneously, all to deliver an expanding list of innovative user services. This means combinations to test are expanding. How can operators adopt their testing and deployment processes to manage this change?
The majority of voice and the data traffic on the cellular networks happens in buildings. Depending on the type of building, there can be a high density of the users at any given time, requiring some buildings to need significantly higher cellular capacity requirements than others.