Construction of a new base station test environment

This final thesis is carried out by request of Nokia Solutions and Networks Ltd in cooperation with Oulu University of Applied Sciences. Nokia is a Finnish corporation focusing multinational tele-communications, information technology, and consumer electronics. This area is very wide and evolving rapidly, so new hardware and features are needed continuously. Purpose of the base station testing is to ensure seamless functionality of mobile networks for end users in all kinds of situations. Even if it were traveling in the metro or walking down the street, users do not want their mobile device connection to work slowly or lose it completely. In this thesis, the author will construct a new base station test line using 4G and 5G and test its functionality with new features. This project is carried out by utilizing the skills learned in Oulu University of Applied Sciences. The project was divided in four phases which were planning, building, deploying and testing the features. In order to achieve the wanted results, thesis author had to research radio technology from many different sources. Optional feature to enable on base station is dynamic spectrum sharing. At the planning phase the author orientated to the given task to find out how the test line must be built and what are the required features. Required user counts and data throughputs for the test line were defined by the company at the beginning. The building phase consists of installing and cabling the required components in the company’s facilities. Also, in the building phase the author codes the commissioning of the test line. The author faces some problems with cell deployment during this phase. In the deployment phase the author works with the stakeholder groups in order to get traffic load simulator working as expected. The traffic load simulator is used to simulate traffic which would normally consist for example from smartphones or other wireless devices. All radio access tech-nologies can be simulated. Finally, the author can test functionality of the new features which includes maximum user count of the base station, and simulated cable breaks for example. At the end of the project the thesis author successfully built new test line and all the required features were tested and passed. The optional feature activation is not possible with used configuration on the test line