How to Test a 5G NR NTN-Enabled Device

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Wireless Test Platform
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Testing a 5G NR NTN-enabled device by emulating network scenarios

Testing 5G New Radio (NR) devices with non-terrestrial networks (NTN) capability requires emulating various realistic, controlled, and repeatable network scenarios. Non-terrestrial networks communicate through satellites, and in common trajectories, satellites often operate within low Earth orbits. Within these orbits, the satellite's speed in relation to the planet is notably high, which results in significant Doppler shifts and time-varying path delays and attenuation. Such challenges necessitate effective coping mechanisms within the network infrastructure. 3GPP introduced various enhancements to address these challenges, including implementing a new system information block in both 4G and 5G networks. The system includes the satellite ephemeris or position information to enable the mobile handset to accurately estimate the Doppler and path delays.

Testing an NTN-enabled mobile handset requires a solution capable of all the new 3GPP enhancements to NTN communications, including testing in the base station infrastructure equipment and mobile handsets. Test engineers need a base station emulator, a channel emulator capable of emulating the low Earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit satellites, and a wireless analyzer toolset for real-time protocol decoding and physical (PHY) analysis. The components of this solution must seamlessly integrate through software automation, enabling scenario replication to perform the most common and tedious measurements. The solution must be able to characterize the end-to-end link quality for different types of application traffic like text messages, data, voice, and video.

5G New Radio NTN-enabled device testing solution

Testing an actual NTN-enabled mobile handset requires a comprehensive emulation test solution. The Keysight 5G NR NTN test solution includes the Keysight UXM 5G wireless test platform, a Keysight PROPSIM channel emulator, and a Keysight WaveJudge analyzer toolset. This comprehensive platform validates the ability of a 5G NR NTN-enabled device to deliver high-quality-of-service applications. The solution tests the ability of 5G NR NTN-enabled handsets to stream data, utilize emergency short messaging service (SMS), and perform other functions using NTN communications.
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