Evaluating the use of PXI modules in tests of a radio base station

Abstract: This thesis project was carried out at the electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) department at Ericsson AB. One of the department’s goals is to seek a possible replacement to the box test instruments by utilizing PCI extension for instrumentation (PXI) modules. The main objective of this project is to evaluate how different PXI modules work during testing of a radio base station (RBS), in terms of performance, test time, and cost. A downlink decoder was implemented in LabVIEW with an extension called MathScript and several software test solutions were examined to measure error vector magnitude (EVM), frequency error, and power, and to perform parallel measurements in a multiple radio access technology (multi-RAT) test configuration. Moreover, several uplink tests were performed to decide if PXI modules are a suitable substitute for the previous box based test instruments. The findings from this study show that PXI modules can replace the previous box based test instruments. However it was concluded that not all areas can be covered and not all discrete test instrument can (yet) be replaced. Future work should complete the downlink decoder implementation in the field programmable gate array (FPGA) level in order to further improve the performance further. Future work should also examine if it is possible to replace all of the discrete test instruments with PXI modules.