New-Tech Europe Magazine | August 2016 | Digital edition

Changes in Wireless Demand a New Test Approach

David Hall, National Instruments

Future of Wireless The International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU’s) vision for International Mobile Telecommunications in 2020 (IMT-2020) outlines one of the clearest requirements for the range of use cases in future wireless standards. This vision, designed as a framework to communicate the technical requirements of 5G, outlines three distinct use cases. Although these use cases specifically define the requirements of future mobile communication standards, they reflect the changing requirements for technologies like 802.11ad, 802.11ax, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, and more. The first wireless use case, Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), defines the evolution in network capacity and peak data rates expected from a future wireless technology – and is designed to deliver up to 10 Gbps of downlink throughput, which is 100X that of single-carrier LTE. The second

Many of you likely remember receiving your first text message or downloading your first web page on a mobile phone. Today, a mobile phone can download high-resolution video in seconds and provide higher data throughput than your first laptop. However, the goal of tomorrow’s wireless is much bigger than giving you faster download speeds. Within a decade, the number of connected devices will outnumber connected people 10 to 1. As a result, future wireless standards are evolving to address new use cases for connecting things instead of merely people. These things will not only use new wireless technologies but also require new instrumentation and carry a lower price tag. Because future devices demand a different approach to wireless test, we at NI are continuing to evolve our PXI platform to address tomorrow’s wireless test challenges.

use case, Massive Machine-Type Communication (mMTC), is designed to deliver wireless access to more devices in more locations at a lower cost. The third and final use case is Ultra-reliable Machine-Type Communication (uMTC) – and established new requirements for improved are latency and packet error rates. The requirements of tomorrow’s wireless technology are not only driving new wireless standards like NB-IoT, 5G, and 802.11ax but also changing the way engineers design and test mobile devices. For example, wider bandwidths in future standards like 5G require wider bandwidth RF instruments. In addition, multi-antenna technologies like MIMO and beamforming produce a need for modular and flexible instrumentation that can scale from testing single- antenna devices to 8x8 MIMO devices and beyond. Finally, lower cost radios also require lower cost approaches to wireless test. In a scenario where

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