Chips and Salsa XIX: Carrier Aggregation Chipset Benchmark Study

You Take the High Band and I'll Take the Low Band

02/28/2015 | 45 pages
Price: $1,495.00

Leveraging the Spirent 8100 test platform as well as engineering support, SRG conducted the industry's first independent benchmark study of LTE-A chipsets with support for 10 MHz + 10 MHz carrier aggregation.

WE DISCUSS THE FOLLOWING:

• Despite the long-term commercial status of LTE-Advanced networks, the number of chipset companies that support the feature is limited and the market share until very recently has been highly concentrated.
• We tested vendor-supplied platforms from three major suppliers: Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung, as well as commercial smartphones with carrier aggregation support.
• With static scheduling the results were very comparable for most test cases, suggesting the industry may need to move away from conformance-based testing as defined by 3GPP and use dynamic scheduling which leverages CQI reports from the modem.
• To the extent there were performance differences, they were evident in the more challenging test scenarios with lower SNR. However, the relative performance differences were not as significant as we’ve seen in the past.