Aeroflex Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Aeroflex Holding Corp., announced that the TM500 LTE Test Mobile now supports enhanced Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (eMBMS) as defined in Release 9 of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard for Long Term Evolution (LTE). The TM500 Test Mobile platform is the industry's de facto standard test mobile, and is already being used by all of the world's major infrastructure vendors and most femtocell vendors.

With the addition of the eMBMS feature, the Aeroflex TM500 LTE Single-UE Test Mobile now supports all the headline features announced with Release 9 of the 3GPP LTE standard. The TM500 provides demodulation and decoding of eMBMS signals—including video—for both FDD and TDD versions of LTE, and will include dedicated measurements for low level debugging.

eMBMS allows LTE mobile network operators to maximize Return on Investment (RoI) by providing high end services such as mobile TV, localized news and traffic updates without making large additional investments in network infrastructure. eMBMS is the most viable technique for providing IP multicast data transmission over an LTE network in a scalable manner. It allows for efficient sharing of the resources of a single network between multicast broadcast traffic and more traditional data services. This is achieved by dynamically changing the resource usage between the two types of traffic depending on their instantaneous needs. The TM500 LTE Test Mobile enables operators and infrastructure vendors to verify the functionality and performance of eMBMS. Engineers developing and integrating LTE base stations (eNodeB) can test and validate the system level end-to-end performance of the network equipment.

The eMBMS testing capability of the TM500 includes: demodulation and decoding of IP multicast transmission from different cells; reception of simultaneous unicast and multicast transmissions; MBMS protocol logging and validation; and power measurement of the eMBMS-specific reference signal. Verification of both eMBMS signal quality and synchronized cells within a Multimedia Broadcast Single Frequency Network (MBSFN) area is also performed. Multiple multicast channels (MCH) from different MBMS service areas can be demodulated.

“The Aeroflex TM500 is leading the market with full support for3GPP Release 9 headline features including support for eMBMS measurements,” said Nicola Logli, Product Manager at Aeroflex. “The TM500 provides a fully software-upgradeable path for the test of LTE eNodeBs. This includes everything from functional single-UE test through multi-UE to load testing based on the emulation of thousands of UEs working in multiple cells.”