Agilent Technologies Adds Phone Solution to LTE Drive Test Portfolio, Enabling Complete Performance, Coverage Testing

The UE solution also enables simultaneous performance measurements of all major wireless technologies. This is a critical capability since LTE technology will interoperate with legacy networks. The phone solution can export results to Agilent's Signaling Analyzer Real Time (SART) for LTE, providing an industry-unique end-to-end solution including the network core, base-stations and mobiles.

Agilent is one of the few test vendors to offer an LTE phone solution, said Dave Stewart, general manager of Agilent's Drive Test Business. The scope, precision and accuracy of its measurements, the built-in pedigree in other wireless technologies, and the integration with SART for end-to-end protocol analysis, are unparalleled in the industry. Our complete Drive Test package will help customers quickly rollout high-bandwidth LTE networks and meet today's high-pressure, time-to-market challenges.

Performance measurements that Agilent customers will find particularly useful include:

* Throughput vs. location -- the changes in throughput as callers move around a network;
* carrier-to-interference ratio -- the level of interference from different radio transmitters using the same frequency;
* channel resource allocation -- how resources on LTE's shared channels are allocated at different times;
* retransmission rates -- how often data is retransmitted to complete a transaction, how rates vary from the middle to the edge of a cell, and how rates vary at different levels of the transmission stack (e.g., the application layer, the RLC layer, etc.); and
* performance-at-cell handover points -- how frequently data sessions drop as callers move from cell to cell or how long it takes for hand-offs to succeed.

Agilent's Drive Test LTE phone solution can scale to cover all RF network activities, including band clearing, troubleshooting and optimization. Users can customize the display to meet their information needs. Agilent's recently launched companion analysis tool allows users to run reports and statistical analyses that simplify the optimization process and the evaluation of collection results.