Exploring 5G Advanced Technology with 89600 VSA Software

This video presents the pioneering 5G Advanced signal analysis capabilities of the Keysight Vector Signal Analysis (89600 VSA) software. It highlights the evolution of 5G, starting from 3GPP Release 15, which established the groundwork for 5G New Radio (5G NR), to Release 18, the advent of 5G Advanced.

The evolution of MIMO is a significant enhancement in 5G Advanced, with improvements in both MU-MIMO and SU-MIMO. For MU-MIMO, the maximum number of antenna ports or layers has doubled from 12 to 24, allowing more devices to be served simultaneously. For SU-MIMO, uplink spatial multiplexing now supports up to 8 transmission layers, matching the downlink’s SU-MIMO capability.

The video demonstrates an example of MU-MIMO where three simultaneous users use the same time and frequency resources, each with 8 antenna ports or transmission layers, totaling 24 ports. Each port in this example is mapped to 64 physical antennas for beamforming, with the 89600 VSA software supporting up to 64 measurement channels. 

For live beamforming measurements, the 89600 VSA software is used with the Keysight multiport RF transceivers (MTRX) hardware which offers up to 64 phase and time-coherent input channels. The VSA can also be used for offline analysis using IQ data files with various file formats, including MATLAB.

The VSA software offers a comprehensive set of measurement results for verifying and visualizing MIMO and beamforming signals. These include:

• constellation diagrams for quick visual checks of signal modulation quality
• detected allocation traces for visualizing each user’s time and frequency allocations
• MIMO info table reporting metrics and impairments for each antenna port
• beam weights trace showing the measured beam weights for each of the 64 physical antennas
• 3D plots visualizing the resulting beam pattern from these weights

5G Advanced also enhances SU-MIMO in the uplink, increasing the maximum number of spatially multiplexed layers from 4 to 8. The video shows an uplink example with a single user utilizing 8 spatially multiplexed ports or layers for 8x8 MIMO. The same measurements available for MU-MIMO are also available for SU-MIMO.

Another key enhancement in 5G Advanced is extending 5G to industries such as railways and public safety. To support such use cases, the 89600 VSA supports the 3 MHz bandwidth, the smallest bandwidth for 5G NR reduced from 5 MHz in Release 18. The VSA can analyze signals from the smallest bandwidth of 3 MHz in FR1, to the highest bandwidth of 2 GHz in FR2.

Watch the demonstration to see how the 89600 VSA software enables 5G Advanced signal analysis.