Last tests before Plugfest tear down: a few Video Calls over LTE where successfully run.
Action shot: The ETSI team arrives to the Orange Labs.
The 2nd Small Cell LTE Plugfest was held from 23 June to 02 July 2014 and was organised by the Small Cell Forum, in partnership with ETSI, and was hosted by the ORANGE Labs in Paris.
These series of Plugfests aim to cultivating an effective ecosystem of interoperable small cells, helping to debug vendor implementations and drive the resolution of standards ambiguities and gaps. This all helps provide operators and consumers with a wider choice of small cell products while also facilitating economies of scale to bring the small cell mass market closer Multi-vendor Self Optimizing Networks (SON) and voice over LTE were two of the topics given attention at the fifth Plugfest in the series, which was also the second one to focus exclusively on LTE small cells and saw attendance almost double compared to previous year’s event.
The scope of this second LTE Plugfest included all small cell LTE variations. Testing concentrated on S1, X2 and management interfaces (TR-069/TR196) and covered areas such as Security, Management, Mobility (Outbound, Inbound), Voice Support via CS Fall-back schemes, Voice and Video over LTE, Location Reporting, CMAS and SON. One of the key areas of focus was the testing of multi-vendor mobility and SON in heterogeneous networks.
The Plugfest was supported by 26 different organisations with 65 engineers onsite, including equipment vendors, test tool vendors and companies providing test network infrastructure: Airspan, Airvana, Alcatel-Lucent, Broadcom, Casa Systems, Cavium, Cisco, Com4Innov, Contela, Fujitsu, IP.access, Ixia, JDSU, NEC, Node-H, One2Many, Orange, Public Wireless, PureWave Networks, Qosmotec, Qucell, Quortus, Radisys, Sistel Networks, SMEC and Stoke.
All participants were requested to conduct remote pre-test integration. By connecting to the remote test infrastructure enabled by ETSI, participants had a chance to anticipate and mitigate connectivity problems during the Plugfest. Running remote pre-testing allowed to target a large scope and ensured a good rate of successful test case execution during the event.
This activity was supported by the European Commission and the NGMN Alliance.
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Last tests before Plugfest tear down: a few Video Calls over LTE where successfully run.
Action shot: The ETSI team arrives to the Orange Labs.
Outside view of the subterranean 15 000 square meters Orange Labs in the heart of Paris.
Console Based Frontend sending a CMAS test message to a mobile phone.
All the participants from the second edition of the Small Cell LTE Plugfest.
Several VolTE calls with QoS were successfully made through Small Cells during the Plugfest.
For debugging it is essential to have dedicated tool vendor support. In the picture above a RF analyzer for spectrum, interference and signaling analysis is shown. The analyzer is deployed to support the handover test scenarios.
The real time end to end monitoring of access and core network interfaces allows to generate traces of the executed test scenarios.
Programmable attenuation devices are deployed to realize multi-smallcell and macro-to-smallcell handover scenarios.
Over 15 test sessions including Regression, Security, Mobility, CSFB, HeMS and SON are being run in parallel among the Plugfest participants.
Four macro eNBs were made available by Orange for Mobility Testing with Small Cells.
Networking event: a dinner cruise on the Seine.
Paris at Sunset.
Self Organizing Network (SON) tests with ORANGE Macros.
Here a vast range of devices, from protoype boards to finished products, is being tested.
CSFB: a participant running a Circuit Switch Fall Back Test Session operating mobile phone in the shielded box.
Plugfest testing room: over 60 engineers are participating to the Small Cell Plugfest 2.
The ORANGE team led by Anne Trehu coordinates the integration of the Small cell equipment with the ORANGE ePC core and access networks.
The ETSI team led by Silvia Almagia and the SmallCell Forum IOT group chair Kreso Bilan and IOT vice chair Virendra Nagar, in charge of the technical and logistical coordination.
1st day at the Small Cell LTE Plugfest 2 event, organized by the Small Cell Forum and ETSI.
After a 30 day remote pretesting phase, the 25 companies arrive and install their devices in the ORANGE test lab, where the event is being hosted.