November 23, 2012. Rohde & Schwarz announced it has developed a new graphical test script development tool—called R&S CMWcards—for the R&S CMW500 wideband radio communication tester. The CMW500 is a multistandard test platform that developers can use to test user equipment for compliance with all wireless communications standards. The new R&S CMWcards does not require any programming experience. R&S CMWcards takes its name from the similarities of its user interface to a card game. Simple rules let users quickly create functional tests or reproduce real network problems.
R&S CMWcards provides a comprehensive pool of cards for the signaling currently used by the LTE and WCDMA standards. Users configure test scripts or parameterize protocol procedures by dragging and dropping the cards into a sequence. R&S CMWcards offers various types of cards—for example, for setup, procedures, or the man-machine interface. The color coding of the cards ensures that created test sequences are practical and useful. A software wizard makes use of the various user equipment states detailed in the 3GPP specification and shows only those cards that put the device under test (DUT) into the desired protocol state. Once the user has finished creating the scenario, the test case can be executed immediately on the R&S CMW500.
R&S CMWcards is suitable for complex applications such as throughput measurements, handover tests, inter-RAT procedures, and IMS VoLTE, including CS fallback (CSFB) and SRVCC, tests. Just like conventional protocol test cases, a message log collects the messages transmitted between the DUT and the network.
The new R&S CMWcards user interface can be added to the R&S CMW500 at any time.