Agilent Technologies and Anite teamed up to demonstrate 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) LTE (long-term-evolution) interoperability at the Mobile World Congress, which took place Feb 16 through 19 in Barcelona, Spain. The demonstration showed end-to-end streaming video with a Blue Wonder UE (user-equipment) chip set, Signalion Sorbas LTE UE simulator, Agilent E6620A LTE wireless-communications test set, and Anite LTE-protocol-development SAT (stand-alone tester).

The demonstration results from an ongoing strategic partnership between Agilent and Anite to deliver LTE-UE-development tools to wireless-system engineers. "Our partnership with Agilent plays a pivotal role in pioneering the LTE ecosystem," says Paul Beaver, business-unit director at Anite. According to Niels Faché, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s mobile-broadband division, the partnership addresses the early-testing needs of LTE-UE developers.

As a key component of the LTE-streaming-video demonstration, Agilent’s E6620A wireless-communications test set provides a common hardware platform, integrating a 3GPP Release 8-compliant protocol stack, which the company jointly developed with Anite. Helping to shorten design cycles, it offers real-time, system-rate network emulation for L1/L2/L3 uplink and downlink through RF or digital baseband. Anite’s SAT, targeting UE designers, comes with the Agilent E6620A platform.

In other LTE news at the Mobile World Congress, Agilent announced that its N5106A PXB (peripheral-component-interconnect-expander-bridge) MIMO (multiple-input/multiple-output) receiver tester, with Agilent’s N7624B Signal Studio for 3GPP LTE, now supports advanced real-time LTE base-station testing with HARQ (hybrid-automatic-repeat-request) feedback from the device under test to enable closed-loop testing with dynamically changing LTE-test signals. The company also demonstrated its W1910/E8895 3GPP LTE TDD (time-division-duplex) wireless library for its SystemVue and ADS (Advanced Design System) and highlighted its SART (signaling analyzer real time) for LTE, which provides monitoring and network diagnostics by interpreting, correlating, and analyzing protocol-signaling messages that multiple network technologies at mobile network interfaces produce.