Utilization of the 5th generation mobile networks for automated tests

Abstract

Internet of things is one of the most important achievements that 5G is expected to bring. Todays LTE and LTE-A networks have limited number of connected users and also the latency introduced in these networks has a wide range. 5G is not only envisioned to provide faster data rates, but also introduce the possible connection of a huge number of devices and expected to reduce the latency significantly. Researchers estimate that 50 billion devices will be connected to the mobile networks within 5 years. Most of these devices will employ tasks that will be controlled from a remote host which requires a very small latency. Therefore, 5G is considered to be the near-perfect media for the internet of things concept. However, 5G as a hot topic, is still under research and there is a long way through realizing it. ASELSAN devoted a highly skilled team for the development of 5G base stations. As test engineers, we will be taking part in the development of 5G, however, in this paper we are not discussing about the tests of 5G networks. Rather we are inspecting the exploitation of 5G for global test scenarios. One possible application for internet of things can be thought as: multiple central or field test stations connected to the internet through 5G networks with low end-to-end latency, which are running test sequences from a cloud database and writing the results to the same database. Moreover, individual devices can connect to mobile networks and provide built-in test results to the same database, which exponentially increase the number of connected devices. In this paper, we are taking the first step towards realizing Internet of test stations. Since the number of test stations can be very high it is intractable to use local test sequences and update core test files manually. We have developed a new test software set that stores all the test sequences in a database and automatically updates the core setup files as needed. With this scheme, it will be very easy to bring all the test-related stuff to Internet. The main focus of the paper is on the design details of the new test executive software introduced.