The End-to-End Wireless Network Simulation Test Suite from GL Communications lets you test cell phone designs and positions of networks by simulating traffic.

When testing a cell phone, other user equipment, or the network connecting it, you often need to simulate a wireless network and its components. After all, it’s the user experience that counts and you certainly don’t want a dropped call. While 5G is all the hype, people throughout the world are still using 4G LTE, 3G, and 2G networks. Voice and text are still the most important features of wireless networks and still need testing. The End-to-End Wireless Lab Test Suite from GL Communications lets you simulate a network or portion of a network for functional testing, quality of service (QoS) testing, and network monitoring.

Running on a standalone PC, GL’s network emulation software test suite gives you the options of emulating 5G, 4G, 3G, or 2G networks and their protocols. The figure shows a 5G network configuration. As a 5G network emulator, the software suite emulates the following protocols and network functions:

• User equipment (UE) and 5G New Radio (gNodeB) base stations,
• Access & Mobility Management Function (AMF),
• Session Management Function (SMF),
• User Plane Function (UPF),
• Authentication Server Function (AUSF),
• Unified data management (UDM),
• Equipment Identity Register (EIR), and
• Short Message Service Function (SMSF)

Based on GL’s Message automation and protocol simulation test tool, the End-to-End Wireless Lab Test Suite supports 5G core (5GC) N1/N2, N4, N8, N10, N11, N12, N13, N17, N20, N21 network interfaces, plus network interfaces for earlier wireless generations. The test suite lets you generate network traffic such as voice, SMS text, and HTTP data calls for testing user devices.

For testing mobile devices, the Test Suite can run on GLs Windows 10 based VQuad and VQuad Probe HD, which provides GPS, Bluetooth, and Ethernet connectivity to devices under test. These devices include include VoIP phones, video conferencing equipment, PTSN phones, and other devices.

In addition to functional testing the Test Suite also lets you perform interoperability testing, migration testing, and performance testing. You can emulate up to 64,000 UEs with voice traffic. For monitoring a core network, you and record voice calls and capture up to 30,000 simultaneous voice calls. You can also perform voice-quality testing using perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) and perceptual objective listening quality assessment (POLQA) metrics.