Rohde & Schwarz submitted its latest 5G NR protocol conformance test cases to the Global Certification Forum (GCF) at the GCF CAG#72 meeting in October 2022 and successfully passed verification. The company now has over 500 GCF-certified protocol conformance test cases, illustrating the leadership of Rohde & Schwarz in 5G NR protocol conformance testing.
Conformance approval is a major step in bringing mobile devices to the market. To ensure cellular devices work in various mobile networks, they need to be certified by testing laboratories accredited by certification bodies such as GCF, PTCRB or CTIA. Meeting all the 3GPP based testing criteria can be difficult and costly for device manufacturers, if not well prepared in advance, especially since with 5G NR the amount of test cases has significantly increased thanks to the large number of supported band combinations, deployment options and evolving standards.
Rohde & Schwarz offers with the R&S CMX500 radio communication tester the GCF test platform TP292, which covers over 500 certified conformance test cases (more than any other in the industry) in a single box. The latest verification of test cases at the GCF CAG#72 meeting enables Rohde & Schwarz to provide 41 certified test cases for the latest Rel. 16 features, including self-organizing network-minimized drive test technology (SON-MDT), radio capability signaling optimization (RACS), NR mobility enhancement, or enhancement of network slicing (eNS). 85 IMS protocol test cases are now available, enabling certification of IP multimedia subsystems. The R&S CMX500 is at the core of Rohde & Schwarz conformance test solutions such as R&S TS8980 (RF testing), R&S TS-RRM (radio resource management) and R&S TS-LBS (location based services).
Rohde & Schwarz offers protocol conformance testing (PCT) and network operator device acceptance testing (NetOp). The test solutions all use the R&S CMX500 one-box tester, which fully supports the 5G FR1 frequency range up to 8 GHz and the FR2 millimeter-wave frequency range up to 50 GHz in one instrument, in both 5G stand-alone and non-stand-alone modes, along with LTE as inter-RAT technology for PCT and NetOp. It can handle many different present and future 5G 3GPP and LTE band combinations. The R&S CMX500 also supports functional testing, basic RF testing, end-to-end application testing (such as VoNR), maximum throughput testing and much more to meet the testing needs of mobile device manufacturers.
