Handover Testing

Tests for mobility use-cases

Another challenging test for a lab is to accurately emulate handoff between user devices and base stations or access points (Inter System Handover) and between user devices and different technologies such as Wi-Fi 6E and 5G (Inter Technology Handover).

Devices in motion trigger roaming or cell handover and data rate adaptation and thus affects all performance and behavior matrixes of a device or system under test.

The RF conductive test setup shown here emulates an outdoor LTE/5G wireless environment, with a 5G/LTE Radio and user devices. This environment can be adapted for testing any other wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee etc. as well.

The radios under test are connected to power dividers/combiners, then into multi-channel programmable attenuators. Finally the signal is routed to a number of user-devices.

Motion can be emulated by ramping the attenuators to introduce signal fading loss versus time. The ramping rate can be accurately controlled to emulate velocity of mobile devices. Spectrum Control’s multi-channel programmable attenuators help simulate the fading loss between the radios and the user devices in a dynamic wireless environment. Each programmable attenuator can be independently programmed to continually step to different values in a sequence, or even step between random values, replicating signal loss in a wireless environment.

This RF Testbed includes Spectrum Control’s digital Lab assistant to help manage test automation for “out of the box” testing of handover performance:

• Fading Simulation
• Received signal level and received signal quality
• Inter system handover
• Inter technology handover
• Inter technology hand off (Vertical handover)