Femtocell testing | Femtocell test cases
This page on Femtocell tutorial covers femtocell testing. It mentions various femtocell test cases required during femtocell development. There are different types of femtocell based on different standards such as wimax, UMTS, LTE etc. Often it is required to test the femtocell with wifi based network. We will go through femtocell test procedure including test cases in general. There are test cases specific to technology based femtocells.
Femtocells or smallcells are used as part of cellular networks. It helps increase the indoor coverage and increases the capacity.
Tools such as vector signal generators and vector signal analyzers are needed in order to perform femtocell testing. Keysight(previously known as Agilent), IXIA, Rohde and Schwarz and Benetel provides the test solutions to perform femtocell tests.
Following test cases are usually tested for femtocell development:
• Femtocell functional tests
• Femtocell Conformance tests
• Femtocell interoperability tests
• Femtocell handover tests
The functional tests are needed during the development stages of the femtocell. They are internal tests which comprises of unit tests as well as integration tests.
Conformance tests are needed after the femtocell is developed. At this stage, regulatory conditions as well as standard compliance limits are required to be verified. The tests include verification of both the femtocell transmitter and receiver. Transmitter tests include max. output power, power spectrum mask, frequency error, EVM, Adjacent channel leakage ratio, code domain error(specific to UMTS), occupied bandwidth etc. Receiver tests include sensitivity level, RSSI, BER etc.
Interopreability tests are needed in order to check the performance of femtocell from one manufacturer with the other manufacturer. It is also required in order to perform testing with other system elements such as HeNB gateway, User Equipment, HeNB management system and so on.
Handover tests are performed to verify handoff between femtocell of one
technology with the other technology and also within the same technology network environments.
Following are the typical femtocell handover test cases:
• Between femtocell of one technology(LTE) with the femtocell of same technology(LTE).
• Between femtocell(LTE) and macrocell(LTE)
• Between LTE femtocell and WiMAX femtocell
• Between LTE femtocell and 3G femtocell
• between Wimax femtocell and LTE/3G femtocell
• Between femtocell of one manufacturer or developer(e.g. IP access) and the other femtocell developer(Freescale or Airvana)
Femtocell tutorial related links
Femtocell Tutorial Femtocell Architecture Femtocell Testing LTE Femtocell Manufacturers Femtocell vs WiFi Femtocell types Femtocell interference timing and synchronization Handover
RF Wireless Tutorials
Refer following RF and wireless tutorials in addition to femtocell tutorial described on this page.
GSM
TD-SCDMA
wimax
LTE
UMTS
GPRS
CDMA
SCADA
WLAN
802.11ac
802.11ad
GPS
Zigbee
z-wave
Bluetooth
UWB
IoT
T&M
satellite
Antenna
RADAR
RFID