A key requirement of Mobile WiMAX equipment is its ability to roam requiring any Mobile/Subscriber (MS/SS) Station to interoperate with any Base Station (BS). This is driving the need to certify products against WiMAX Forum® approved Conformance Test Equipment. The WiMAX Forum® has approved the MiNT T2230/1 Protocol Conformance Tester (PCT) as a platform to certify devices in WFDCL (WiMAX Forum® Designated Certification Laboratories).

Protocol certification for MS/SS and BS is mandatory and the vendor is responsible for investigating, fixing and financing retests caused by failure during certification in a WiMAX Forum® Designated Test Laboratories. Testing against an approved device in your development labs will therefore provide great financial savings by keeping the conformance test houses out of the development cycle.

Aeroflex and AT4 wireless have introduced the MiNT T2230 Protocol Conformance Test System (PCT) for development and certification testing of WiMAX Subscriber Station (SS) and the T2231 variant to test Base Station (BS) devices.

The test system is co-developed by Aeroflex and AT4 wireless and uses the latest picoChip software physical layer to give the control and configurability necessary to meet the industry’s testing requirements. The advanced hardware platform of the MiNT T2230/1 allows it to evolve with the changing IEEE, ETSI and WiMAX Forum® specifications. This future proof design combined with the Aeroflex enhancement package will protect your investment throughout the introduction of new features and the development life of your devices.

Support for WiMAX builds upon existing protocol technology products for GSM, CDMA and WCDMA, for which Aeroflex delivers approved test cases to the wireless certification industry.

Product Overview

• Protocol development, conformance analysis and certification testing for WiMAX 802.16e
• Emulated BS and SS providing full support for testing and validation of WiMAX vendor PHY and MAC layers
• Support for the first and all future waves of 802.16e certification
• ETSI TTCN-3 Test Cases to perform WiMAX Forum® Protocol Conformance Testing
• Development mode providing multi-layer logging and protocol decoding
• Pre-Conformance testing mode for advanced access to WiMAX test cases
• Test result analysis handler with message exchanges, detailed diagnostics and test verdict summaries

A number of additional software components are available as options to extend the functionality and flexibility of the AIME and CT for these R&D and Conformance Test applications.

Supporting Advanced Wave 1 and Wave 2 Conformance Features

Advanced wave 1 features such as HARQ, Sleep & Idle mode can be tested using a single signaling unit. Handover testing is performed using multiple signaling units and a signal control PC. An inbuilt fading simulator and two RF interfaces are used to test MIMO service flows.

Application Testing on the T2230/1 AIME

The MiNT T2230/1 AIME system is able to establish a network entry and service flow, allowing users to test applications running on their device by simulating either the Base Station or the Mobile/Subscriber station over the R1 'air interface'.