Three 5G New Radio Challenges You Can Solve Today

Technical Marketing Engineer Keysight Technologies

- Nick Ben

Introduction

Technological innovation changes how society interacts with the world around them and the speed at which it’s done: Not so long ago, a hand-written letter took weeks to get to Aunt Abby. Then an e-mail came along and fundamentally changed the way we communicated, by enabling messages to be delivered in seconds rather than days or weeks. Innovation in mechanical engines made the automobile mainstream, replacing horse-drawn carriages and helping people and goods get from point A to point B in a fraction of the time it once took. While 5G New Radio (NR) is being partially driven by consumer demand, it’s primarily attributed to the innovators who push the edge of technology and speed. Consumers have a growing insatiable need for bandwidth and speed, but much of this is spurred by technological innovation. As promising as 5G NR technology looks, getting there comes with its own set of challenges.

5G New Radio

Consumer demand for more bandwidth, higher data transfer speeds, and better connectivity is pushing engineers like you to innovate the next frontier of cellular technology, using 5G NR to meet these demands with a reliable communication network. With 5G NR, you will need to utilize new and existing technologies to achieve extreme data throughputs while simultaneously introducing new test challenges: testing at millimetre-wave frequencies, wider channel bandwidths, and complex multi-antenna configurations.

5G NR mobile devices and base stations will implement sub-6 GHz and millimetre wave (mmWave) designs that require optimizing and validating 3D beam performance with new, more complex over-the-air (OTA) test configurations with wide channel bandwidths and multi-channel MIMO test requirements. This complexity increases the number of instruments needed and measurement uncertainties in mmWave OTA systems, making it more difficult to achieve accurate and repeatable measurements.