Rohde & Schwarz FS-K103PC MIMO signals test

Rohde & Schwarz is claiming to be the first T&M equipment supplier to offer a test solution for 3GPP LTE uplink with MIMO technology.

The current release of the R&S FS-K103PC software option for the FSV, FSQ and FSW signal analysers allows chipset manufacturers to develop the components for tomorrow’s user equipment - today.

The software already meets one of the requirements of LTE-Advanced, the next incarnation of the 3GPP LTE standard. In release 10 for LTE-Advanced, the 3GPP has specified that user equipment with MIMO technology will be able to use up to four antennas to transmit data in the uplink to the mobile radio network.

In the downlink, up to eight parallel data streams are provided. MIMO allows the capacity of the LTE network to be expanded even further.

Currently, 3GPP LTE only uses MIMO in the downlink with four parallel data streams. Until now, transmission of only one data stream was possible in the uplink.

Chipset developers can use the new software option to directly test whether the LTE uplink MIMO function is correctly implemented in the device under test.

A set-up consisting of two signal analysers connected to a PC is used to test two antennas of the device under test simultaneously. This allows users to verify the MIMO pre-coding. The software analyses the data streams and their distribution among the antennas according to the matrix multiplication defined by 3GPP. This also makes it possible to verify the time correlation between the antenna signals.