Ixia Launches Scalable 5G User Equipment Emulation Solution

Keysight Technologies, Inc. announced the availability of a new scalable 5G User Equipment (UE) Emulation Solution from Ixia, a Keysight Business. The new solution provides network equipment manufacturers and solution providers with end-to-end, scalable testing of 5G base stations to ensure that devices and network services meet customer expectations for latency, reliability, and high-speed broadband at scale.

The market is ready for the first 5G devices to arrive later in the year. However, service providers and network equipment manufacturers need a way to validate 5G NR RAN functionality through the full communications protocol stack today.

“We are happy to be leveraging Keysight’s XAir3 5G UE Emulator platform to accelerate our 5G commercialization plans,” said Sadayuki Abeta, general manager of Radio Access Network Development Department, NTT DOCOMO.

Keysight’s 5G UE Emulation solution features the XAir3 platform, a powerful test product delivering functional layer-by-layer testing, as well as load, scale, and performance testing. XAir3 is the successor to XAir2 4G LTE-Advanced UE emulation platform. The XAir3 platform supports both Non-Stand Alone and Stand Alone modes, sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave radios as well as xRAN architectures. With this solution, users can perform capacity tests, analyze cell throughput, measure voice and video quality and model a wide variety of mobility scenarios in the lab prior, during and after service roll-out from a single tool without the need for real devices.

“The industry needs a scalable and flexible UE emulation solution that simulates complex network configurations and real subscriber behavior,” said Mark Pierpoint, president, Ixia Solutions Group, Keysight Technologies, Inc. “Keysight’s XAir3 UE platform successfully enables network equipment manufacturers and service providers to test for a wide range of demanding requirements and a variety of configurations for 5G to ensure their products and services meet the promises of 5G -- low latency, ultra-reliability and high speed at scale. We're pleased that Keysight provides the solution for NTT DOCOMO to validate 5G base station."

Attendees at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2019 in Barcelona, Spain, can receive a first-hand demonstration of the company’s 5G User Equipment (UE) Emulation Solution at the Keysight booth: Hall 6 Booth 6G30.