Keysight combines 5G and GNSS for location-based services

This industry achievement will accelerate the implementation of LBS in smartphones by enabling mobile phone vendors to verify that designs comply to the latest 3GPP specifications that support accurate location positioning in a wide range of sectors, including healthcare, road and aerial transportation, emergency and rescue services, public safety, and homeland security. Highly precise positioning services also enable mobile operators to deliver personalized services supporting entertainment, hospitality, and retail applications.

“The GCF validation of the first 5G LBS test case demonstrates Keysight’s commitment to supporting rapid development of technologies that enhance 5G NR deployment, benefiting consumers, enterprises, and government organisations,” said Muthu Kumaran, General Manager at Keysight Technologies. “Keysight brings holistic test capabilities to a connected ecosystem of chipset and device vendors that relies on device test platforms with continuous and comprehensive test case support, meeting the evolving requirements of GCF and other reference certification bodies.”

LBS leverages different technologies, including global positioning system (GPS), GNSS, BeiDou, Galileo, beamforming, and round-trip time (RTT) to geographically locate a user. LBS test cases allow users to verify sensitivity, accuracy, and dynamic range in mobile phones that leverage satellite constellations such as GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou to identify precise geographic location.

The GCF conformance agreement group (CAG) meeting #72, held on the 21st of October, confirmed the validation of the first 5G LBS A-Galileo test case, which was supported by Keysight’s S8705A RF/RRM DVT and Conformance Toolset. The toolset provides access to a wide range of radio frequency, radio resource management (RRM), and development validation test (DVT) test cases used to verify 5G NR designs in both non-standalone (NSA) and standalone (SA) deployment modes.

The S8705A toolset used the E7515B UXM 5G Wireless Test Platform, a compact signaling test platform with multiformat stack support, rich processing power, and abundant RF resources for emulating various mobility scenarios in a 5G network as well as a recommended GNSS emulator to deliver the LBS test case. At the CAG #72 meeting, it was also confirmed that Keysight continues to support a leading number of GCF validated conformance test cases for 5G RF, RRM, and protocol testing.