CM360°

A turnkey 5G Field-to-Lab solution based on R&S®CMX500

5G New Radio (NR) is the fifth-generation radio interface and radio access technology (RAT) which was officially published by 3GPP in release 15. With the 5G technology, it enters a new era to meet the ever-increasing demands of mobile communications not only in the conventional cellular communication world, but also in the vertical industries.

Since the commercialization of 5G NR, worldwide 162 networks have been deployed as per the report of GSA. On the path to the 5G NR network commercialization and service launch, field test is one of the essential user centric processes that User Equipment (UE) vendors should go through. Sophisticated features and versatile deployment options have to be thoroughly checked to ensure the reaching of certain confidence level before the official launch.

However, field test is often linked with some challenges, such as

► High costs due to the extensive drive tests

► Time tedious analysis of a drive test that lowers the efficiency

► Lack of test repeatability that makes the regressing tests impossible

What if providing an alternative solution in a laboratory environment to cope with all above mentioned challenges during the field test? R&S® as a world-wide well established test measurement equipment manufacturer and solution provider developed a 5G field-to-lab (F2L) turn-key solution, R&S®CM360°. It features

► the simulation of the network with the real network configurations to avoid the cost intensive drive test by utilizing mobile radio tester R&S®CMX500

► intuitive tools to visualize, drill down the problems and therefore enhance the debugging efficiency based on R&S®SmartAnlytics

► the specialized key performance indicator (KPI) tests configured through real network data offered on R&S®CMX500 that guarantee the test reliability and repeatability

This application note aims to demonstrate the status of quo R&S®CM360° F2L solution.