Hybrid Approach for Protocol Testing of LTE System: A Practical Case Study

The increasing usage of mobile data-intensive applications and their needs for high data rates are setting challenges towards the today´s wireless mobile communication systems. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has addressed these challenges by introducing an IP-based Long-Term Evolution (LTE) project based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) technology, aiming to provide wireless communication standard with targeted data rates over 100Mbits/s. Development of LTE-based communication system sets major challenges for the testing process. Testing of particular protocol implementations of an incomplete system is challenging, as testing needs to be carried out in both simulation-based (when hardware not yet available) and target environments. There is often also need to simulate the over- and underlying protocol layers as these may not be available during early phase testing. This paper describes a practical case study where a hybrid approach of simulation- and target-based testing is carried out for testing particular protocol implementation. The described approach enables convenient transition from early phase simulation-based testing of single protocol layer to target testing of the overall system including the complete communication protocol stack.