Meeting The Test Challenges Of 4G LTE

This article is part of a series of quarterly guest columns by Mark Elo, RF Marketing Director, Keithley Instruments, Inc.

Introduction

As RF designers work rapidly to create products that support the new Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular wireless standard, understanding the new test requirements for LTE assumes ever greater importance as this technology becomes more widespread. For the wireless industry, these changes are nearly as significant as the move from analog to digital, requiring new measurements and new test equipment. Here we look at what LTE is and the main challenges to testing for engineers.

What is LTE?

LTE is a next-generation wireless network technology for 3GPP cellular networks promising very high data rates providing significant improvements to end-user experience by allowing operators to provide common applications and services across other fixed and wireless access technologies. Sometimes called 4G, LTE-based networks are OFDM–based (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) with MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) transmission schemes.