Preface
5G New Radio (NR) is the fifth-generation radio interface and radio access technology (RAT) which was
officially published by 3GPP in release 15. With the 5G technology, it enters a new era to meet the ever-
increasing demands of mobile communications not only in the conventional cellular communication world, but
also in the vertical industries.
As per 3GPP definition, 5G NR is designed to support broadband mobile communications to serve bandwidth
hungry applications like 3D video streaming with demanding of Gigabytes per second, as well as low
bandwidth transmissions required in machine-to-machine (M2M) communication at a massive deployment
scale. In addition, 5G NR should provide the ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC) services that
meet the requirements of time critical applications, such as autonomous driving.
Since the commercialization of 5G NR, worldwide 162 networks have been deployed as per the report of
GSA [1]. On the path to the 5G NR network commercialization and service launch, field test is one of the
essential user centric processes that User Equipment (UE) vendors should go through. Sophisticated
features and versatile deployment options have to be thoroughly checked to ensure the reaching of certain
confidence level before the official launch.
However, field test is often linked with some challenges, such as
► High costs due to the extensive drive tests
► Time tedious analysis of a drive test that lowers the efficiency
► Lack of test repeatability that makes the regressing tests impossible
What if providing an alternative solution in a laboratory environment to cope with all above mentioned
challenges during the field test? R&S
®
as a world-wide well established test measurement equipment
manufacturer and solution provider developed a 5G field-to-lab (F2L) turn-key solution, R&S
®
CM360°. It
features
► the simulation of the network with the real network configurations to avoid the cost intensive drive test by
utilizing mobile radio tester R&S
®
CMX500
► intuitive tools to visualize, drill down the problems and therefore enhance the debugging efficiency
based on R&S
®
SmartAnlytics
► the specialized key performance indicator (KPI) tests configured through real network data offered on
R&S
®
CMX500 that guarantee the test reliability and repeatability
This application note aims to demonstrate the status of quo R&S
®
CM360° F2L solution. It has the structure
as follows
Chapter 1 gives an overview of the R&S
®
CM360° test solution with respect to its system components
Chapter 2 describes more in details about the working flow of R&S
®
CM360°
Last but not least, chapter 3 provides an outlook of R&S
®
CM360° solution to show its dynamic feature
development.
Following R&S
®
product abbreviations are used in the subsequent text.
► R&S
®
CM360° 5G Field-to-Lab solution is referred as CM360°
► R&S
®
CMW500 mobile radio tester is referred as CMW
► R&S
®
CMX500 mobile radio tester is referred as CMX
► R&S
®
CMsquares user interface and control center of CMX is referred as CMsquares