Extensive and repeatable experimentation in mobile communications with programmable instruments

The Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments (SCPI) is the most widespread interface for measurement equipment control in many areas, for example, electronics or telecommunications. Typically, these instruments are used only by experts with the support of ad-hoc software tools provided by the hardware vendor. A way to expand their use to less experienced professionals is the development of control frameworks with user interfaces commonly used in many testing and experimentation areas. This paper presents such a framework, based on the use of recent standards to define experiments, in order to control SCPI-compliant measurement equipment with more user-friendly interfaces that allow experiments to be automated. The use of technologies like cOntrol and Management Framework (OMF), OMF Measurement Library (OML) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) reduces the integration time to build such an experimentation framework involving several SCPI instruments and offers powerful script languages to reduce the time required for defining experiments. The MORSE team at the Universidad de Malaga (UMA) has defined a methodology to construct complex testbeds following these ideas. UMA has validated the proposal with the integration of commercial equipment to obtain a testbed for experimentation in 4G and future 5G mobile network technologies. The testbed can be used remotely to define and control experiments and to obtain the results in a very user-friendly way. The same approach can be applied to other domains.