Equipment maker Rohde & Schwarz has launched what it says is the world's first test solution for LTE uplink with MIMO technology, which may aid development of LTE-Advanced phones.
The R&S FS-K103PC software already meets one of the requirements of LTE-Advanced, the next incarnation of the 3GPP LTE standard, the company said.
In release 10 for LTE-Advanced, the 3GPP has specified that user equipment with MIMO technology will be able to use up to four antennas to transmit data in the uplink to the mobile radio network.
In the downlink, up to eight parallel data streams are provided. MIMO allows the capacity of the LTE network to be expanded even further. Currently, 3GPP LTE only uses MIMO in the downlink with four parallel data streams. Until now, transmission of only one data stream was possible in the uplink.
Chipset developers can now use the new software option to directly test whether the LTE uplink MIMO function is correctly implemented in the device under test.