“Between ongoing work in China and probable deployment in India’s Broadband Wireless Access bands, TD-LTE may well be the wireless technology of choice for hundreds of millions of subscribers,” said Rob VanBrunt, vice president of Spirent’s Wireless business. “While the complexities of advanced antenna techniques require careful design and testing, the reward is very high data throughput capability. We look forward to seeing the results of the industry’s hard work, and are delighted to be a part of enabling it.”
Unlike the Frequency-Domain implementation of LTE currently being deployed in North America and Europe, TD-LTE uses a single shared frequency band for both uplink and downlink. Beamforming is an adaptive antenna technique used to maximize the performance of wireless systems. It typically makes use of eight antennas on the base station and two on the mobile device (8×2).
Spirent’s SR5500 is used to simplify and accelerate the testing associated with complex beamforming implementations. The SR5500 is a modular system which creates realistic synchronized radio paths by affecting a transmitted radio signal in the same way as a live environment (i.e. noise, radio-wave reflections, etc.). For this application, Spirent has developed a fully-integrated 8×2 bi-directional (downlink and uplink) SR5500 configuration controlled by a single software user interface.