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IoT Device Testing
Create a robust IoT device
IoT devices offer great convenience and are rapidly making their way into our daily lives. However, having large numbers of devices in a small space increases complexity in product design, test, performance, and security.
Design engineers and IoT device manufacturers face challenges designing and testing these devices to ensure they are reliable and secure. They will need to address the five “C” challenges across the entire IoT device life cycle — connectivity, continuity, compliance, coexistence, and cybersecurity. Keysight is here to help you build robust and resilient IoT devices.
Address the 5 C's of IoT Design and Test Challenges
Reliable Connectivity Ensures a Strong IoT Foundation
The IoT is rapidly expanding into previously unconnected industries with applications such as remote machinery, remote surgery, and energy distribution in smart grids. Many wireless technologies support these applications.
Connectivity presents new challenges to designers — highly complex systems, evolving wireless standards, and dense device deployments that must work reliably and without fail. Take steps today to understand the various IoT wireless technologies and test solutions right for your IoT device.
Optimize the Power Continuity of Your IoT Device
Finding the optimal balance between battery protocol and software functionality to get reliable performance and service life requires an in-depth understanding of battery life and current drain.
With its current and power measurement technology, Keysight has extensive experience in making these measurements. We offer a broad range of solutions to enable engineers to get convenient, fast, and accurate results that properly characterize battery drain on IoT devices.
Keep Up with Evolving Regulatory Compliance
Compliance is about making sure your IoT devices adhere to the radio standards and global regulatory requirements. For IoT device makers, it is essential to accomplish pre-compliance and compliance testing throughout the product life cycle, including the design, test validation, manufacturing, and deployment phases.
Learn about regulatory standards and gain a better understanding of interference challenges to design and develop products that can withstand the rigors of the real world.
Coexistence is Essential for Stable, Reliable Communication
Three key factors drive coexistence concerns: increased use of wireless technology for critical equipment connectivity, extensive use of unlicensed or shared spectrum, and higher deployment rates of IoT devices. Overcoming interference is critical, especially in places like healthcare facilities with sensitive equipment like intravenous infusion pumps, pacemakers, and defibrillators.
Ensuring reliable wireless network performance in the presence of many smart devices on potentially overcrowded radio bands requires a solid plan for coexistence test.
Strengthen the Cybersecurity of Your Network
Cybersecurity is a concern for individuals as well as large organizations. With the exponential growth of household IoT devices and the widespread deployment of wireless sensors come stories about hacked smart household products, worries about identity theft, and ever-increasing concerns about data breaches.
Cybersecurity challenges reach many levels — from devices to the communications network, cloud, applications, and even users. Enterprises need to find solutions that cater to different scenarios to counter cybersecurity issues.
End-to-End Battery Solutions for Wireless Devices
The rise of power revolution sees increasingly reliable battery technologies and transition towards portability and convenience.
This is driving market growth, not just for battery manufacturing, but also for battery-powered devices.
As a device engineer, you may need to characterize battery performance to choose the optimum battery to support your device’s applications.
Or you design and manufactures batteries, and you may need to evaluating the self-discharge behavior of cell designs.
Whichever your testing needs are, Keysight is ready to help with its vast battery solutions.
Testing Beyond the 5 C’s of IoT: Customer Experience
As IoT systems become more complex and mission-critical, incorporating user experience testing throughout the product development lifecycle is essential to deliver the highest-quality device and best possible customer experience.
Keysight strives to accelerate innovation in the digital age through our test and measurement expertise. Our end-to-end customer experience test solutions integrate hardware instruments and software with four additional components:
- device physical modeling with instrument measurement control interface
- simulation with advanced automation, enabling quicker and more precise development
- software or application modeling that can simulate real user scenarios
- cloud software modeling and analytics, combined with machine learning, to profile user behavior
Signal and Power Integrity Testing
Low-power, highly integrated mixed-signal ICs are especially susceptible to crosstalk. Similarly, low power distribution networks typically have much smaller supply tolerances, causing clocks and digital data to be more easily impacted by ripple, noise, and transients riding on the power rails.
Testing for signal and power integrity issues is essential to create successful, reliable IoT designs. Physical-layer time- and frequency-domain measurements and comprehensive analysis software are necessary to reduce board spin so you can get your products to market faster.
Keysight’s signal integrity and power integrity simulation and measurement tools are suitable for testing all major digital design and interconnect standards, from the mobile industry processor interface (MIPI) to double data rate (DDR).
Regulatory Compliance Testing
The race to launch Internet of Things chipsets, modules, and devices are pushing test labs to the limit. Keysight’s regulatory test solution accelerates the certification of wireless devices operating in unlicensed bands.
Equip your lab to address evolving regulatory standards and meet time-to-market demands. Simplify your compliance test workflow with purpose-built test software and a flexible, scalable solution that is configurable to suit your test needs.
Design and Simulation Tools
Advances in mixed-signal integrated circuit (IC) technology have been a key enabler of IoT devices; devices are increasingly using printed antennas, multiple antennas, and multiple radios. Greater integration delivers lower cost, lower energy consumption, and better performance.
With increasing complexity, electrical, thermal, and mechanical behaviors need to be fully evaluated. Keysight's design and simulation tools support an accurate and seamless flow of co-simulation across multiple realms and technologies — from component to system level.
Cybersecurity Validation
The Internet of Things is rapidly changing our world, with billions of interconnected smart devices assisting us with transportation, healthcare, security, and communications. Securing these devices before deployment is critical to prevent loss of privacy, financial loss, and even risks to personal safety and national defense.
By evaluating full-stack security, including communication chipsets and device firmware and applications, Keysight’s IoT Security assessment can validate the security of virtually any IoT device – from smartwatches to headphones to connected cars to medical implants.
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IoT Education Hub: Device Test
Designing IoT devices with the performance and battery life needed is no easy task. It requires more than a keen understanding of the challenges you’ll face, and selection of the right solutions. You need to know how to use those solutions to solve your challenges, and the best measurement tips and practices to follow.
The IoT Education Hub offers you access to the latest educational resources on IoT device testing. Download valuable “how-to” information and learn how you can ensure your IoT devices are developed with minimal board spins, thoroughly tested for the real world, and can get to market on time and ahead of the competition.
Let Keysight’s IoT Education Hub help you realize the promise of IoT today.
Accelerate IoT Device Testing
Frequently Asked Questions – IoT Device Testing
IoT device testing is the process used by design and test engineers to evaluate the functionality, reliability, performance and security of IoT devices. IoT testing spans the entire IoT device lifecycle from research and development in the laboratory to operation in the field.
IoT devices perform a wide range of functions for various applications ranging from fitness activity tracking to industrial automation. These devices need to communicate with other devices and systems and perform for long periods of time using limited resources. They also need to comply with various standards around the world and be secure. As a result, they require different types of testing including:
- Connectivity testing
- Continuity testing
- Compliance testing
- Coexistence testing
- Cybersecurity testing
- Customer experience testing
Testing the connectivity of IoT devices helps ensure that the devices connect to one another, the cloud and the world around them.
Continuity testing enables design and test engineers to optimize battery protocol and software functionality to extend battery life, an essential attribute of IoT devices that need to perform for long periods of time between charges like smart meters and industrial wireless sensors, and for those IoT devices used in critical applications like pacemakers.
Compliance testing checks that IoT devices meet various radio standards and global regulatory requirements. This type of testing covers two types of certification tests (conformance and compliance) that are both essential for IoT device manufacturers to gain market access.
IoT devices operate in increasingly crowded wireless environments. Coexistence testing helps ensures these devices can operate in the presence of other devices. Such testing enables IoT device manufacturers to assess the risks and ability of their device to maintain their functional wireless performance (FWP) in the presence of unintended signals.
Cybersecurity testing helps protect IoT devices from potential security threats. This type of testing is critical for IoT device manufacturers to identify and remediate security vulnerabilities.
Finally, customer experience testing helps ensure IoT devices deliver a high quality of experience to end users. This type of testing is essential for IoT device makers to gain a competitive advantage in their markets.
IoT testing plays a critical role in the successful development and deployment of IoT devices by helping to ensure these devices operate as intended. Such testing is growing in importance for several reasons including:
- IoT devices are expanding their reach beyond consumer use cases into more critical applications.
- Wireless standards continue to evolve at a rapid rate.
- IoT devices are proliferating making the environment in which they operate increasingly dense.
More IoT Resources
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