Aeroflex TM500 test mobile with added 3GPP Rel-10 TM9 support

Aeroflex Limited has released the TM500 LTE-A Single UE Test Mobile with added support for 3GPP Release 10 (Rel-10) Transmission Mode 9 (TM9), which allows enhanced network capability and performance by flexible use of MIMO with minimum additional overhead.

The test mobile tracks the 3GPP road map, providing a fully software-upgradeable path from functional single user equipment (UE) test, through multi-UE, to load testing based on the emulation of thousands of UEs working in multiple cells. TM9 is the latest step in this road map, enabling the testing of 3GPP Release 10 enhancements including the potential for higher-order MIMO and beamforming.

The mobile is based on the industry-standard TM500 platform. With TM9 support, it now allows testing of TM9 features in a single-cell configuration, allowing its functional performance to be verified.

The mobile provides demodulation of downlink data based on the demodulation reference signal (DMRS) and calculation of channel state information (CSI) feedback from the UE. This information consists of the precoding matrix indicator, rank indicator and channel quality indicator, which are based on the introduced reference signal (CSI-RS).

Logging of both Rel-10 related protocol messages and power levels of these defined reference signals, CSI-RS and DMRS, has been added, to ease debugging of the feature.