Spirent Communications, Rockville, Maryland, is enhancing its SR5500 Wireless Channel Emulator. Spirent has added a cost-effective Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) option to the SR5500, which should simplify wireless receiver test setups. This option reduces the complexity and time required to fully qualify receiver performance against industry standards and representative real-world scenarios.

The SR5500 supports testing of current and next-generation air interface technologies, including WCDMA, HSDPA, CDMA2000 1X, 1xEV-DO, 1xEV-DV and WLAN. The addition of the new AWGN option eliminates the need for external noise generators‥

The Wireless Channel Emulator emulates complex wideband radio channel characteristics such as time-varying multipath delay spread, fading and channel loss. The SR5500 replicates real-world deployment conditions using powerful digital signal processing techniques that make it possible to isolate wireless receiver performance issues early in the development and design verification cycle. Digital integration of AWGN provides accuracy and repeatability for C/N, C/No, and Eb/No ratios.