Aeroflex TM500 test mobile platform with eICIC added support

Aeroflex has added support for enhanced Inter Cell Interference Cancellation (eICIC) to the TM500 test mobile platform.

eICIC is a technique specifically designed to improve the overall performance of heterogeneous network (HetNet) deployments and is one of the main features specified for LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) in 3GPP Release10.

The main application of eICIC is to improve cell edge performance and coverage in HetNet deployment scenarios where nodes of different types - macro-, micro- and picocells - have coverage areas that partially overlap.

This enhancement allows engineers developing and testing LTE base stations (eNodeB) to integrate and validate the eICIC feature and to verify the advantages of heterogeneous deployments.

The test mobile’s support for eICIC measurements, which applies to both FDD and TDD, includes logging the eICIC-specific protocol messages and physical layer measurements.