DuoSIM Hardware
Artiza’s LTE Tester hardware comprises a series of powerful hardware, baseband blade, sRIO (serial Rapid I/O) switch blade, and DSP processing blades/submodules in ATCA platform. One DuoSIM consists of four blades, each responsible for UL-baseband, DL-baseband, UE protocol processing (DSP Array Blade), and S1/X2 protocol processing (DSP Array Blade). The blade-oriented hardware architecture (Table1/2/3) enables flexible testbed configuration to meet various vendor’s requirements, such as capacity, performance, and number of sectors.
| Slot | Category | Hardware | Usage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | UE-SIM (Sector 1) | Baseband Blade | DL baseband |
| 2 | Baseband Blade | UL baseband | |
| 3 | UE-SIM (Sector 2) | Baseband Blade | DL baseband |
| 4 | Baseband Blade | UL baseband | |
| 5 | UE-SIM (Sector 3) | Baseband Blade | DL baseband |
| 6 | Baseband Blade | UL baseband | |
| 7 | Management | Switch Blade | sRIO Switching |
| 8 | Blank | N/A | N/A |
| 9 | Management | CPU Blade | Chassis Management |
| 10 | UE-SIM (Sector 1) | DSP Array Blade | Uu protocol processing |
| 11 | UE-SIM (Sector 2) | DSP Array Blade | Uu protocol processing |
| 12 | Blank | N/A | N/A |
| 13 | UE-SIM (Sector 3) | DSP Array Blade | Uu protocol processing |
| 14 | S1/X2-SIM (Sector 1/2/3) | DSP Array Blade | S1/X2 protocol processing |
| Slot | Category | Hardware | Usage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | S1/X2-SIM (Sector 1) | DSP Array Blade | S1/X2 protocol processing |
| 2 | UE-SIM (Sector 1) | DSP Array Blade | Uu protocol processing |
| 3 | UE-SIM (Sector 1) | Baseband Blade | DL baseband |
| 4 | Baseband Blade | UL baseband | |
| 5 | Management | Switch Blade | sRIO Switching |
| 6 | Management | CPU Blade | Chassis Management |
The outstanding capacity of 1,000 UEs/sector is the first in the industry, made possible by high-performance baseband processing units with a number of FPGAs/DSPs on a blade. This original blade is entirely developed by Artiza’s in-house engineering team from the PCB (20 Kpins) design to FPGA logical circuit and DSP software implementation, well crafted to the level of artistic work (Figure 1). With the special blade hardware design, the product has the full control of baseband processing, especially for PHY/MAC layers testing, becoming one of the most important factors for LTE eNB performance. In addition to the legacy RF interface, use of CPRI interface has tremendously improved the test efficiency.
New ATCA blade becomes available for all models of DuoSIM to generate higher traffic on C-plane and U-plane via Uu and S1/X2 interfaces. The new blade is an array of powerful DSP processors consisting of 8 DSP submodules with traffic engines and large scale FPGAs (Figure 2). The blade comes with two options (AN2-B-DT8-01-001/ AN2-B-DT7-01-001), which deal with Uu and S1/X2 interfaces respectively. For Uu interface, generated traffic is passed through the 10-Gbps sRIO interface on backplane into baseband blade. And for S1/X2 interface, traffic is through the 10GbE or 1GbE port on the front panel. This powerful architecture achieves simulation of various protocols and tremendously high capacity per chassis.
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