A heritage of collaboration with industry leading terminal manufacturers has enabled Anritsu to announce a 'first-to-market' Multimedia Broadcast / Multicast Service (MBMS) test solution for its highly successful PTS (Protocol Test System), 'confirming its leadership position in 3G research and development test', says the company.
MBMS physical layer test capability was first launched in the MD8480C W-CDMA Signalling Tester in January 2007. Initial layer 3 test functionality will be introduced into the Protocol Test System (PTS) in February with further MBMS enhancements planned during the year. An MBMS protocol conformance test capability for GCF certification is also planned.
MBMS introduced in 3GPP Release 6, is a feature which offers two new bearer services, Broadcast Mode and Multicast Mode, enabling the delivery of multimedia content directly to handsets via point-to-point or point-to-multipoint transmission. This is achieved either as a stream which is played back at the receiver in near-real-time or as one or more files downloaded to the device for playback at a convenient time.
The growth in demand for point-to-point high bandwidth content delivery such as real time streaming and video services is currently being constrained by available network capacity. By providing MBMS test functionality Anritsu is meeting industry demand head on, playing a pivotal role in enabling the delivery and transmission of content via MBMS which in turn provides improved network resource sharing, enabling the efficient usage of radio-network and core-network resources.
MBMS is an attractive upgrade to current infrastructure services as it requires no hardware modifications and will not affect current capacity for voice and data communications. It is envisaged that MBMS will be the primary vehicle for, streaming and downloading services over the UE and as such will provide operators with a method of user initiated content targeting and greatly improved revenue streams, says the company.
