Status and Enhancement of 5G-A Millimeter Wave Wireless Devices RF Testing

For 5G New Radio (NR) wireless devices, Radio Frequency (RF) testing — specifically conformance testing including RF, Radio Resource Management (RRM), and performance testing — plays a crucial role in fully characterizing their RF performance. This is of great importance in commercial development and is essential for device certification. With the maturity of 5G and the development of 5G Advanced (5G-A), more and more new requirements have been raised for Millimeter Wave (mm-wave) devices, which therefore pose new challenges and research topics for mm-wave devices RF testing. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Radio Access Network (RAN) plenary has already announced that its Release 18 is the first release for 5G-A. It includes study items that could have a profound impact on 5G mm-wave devices and significantly improve their performance. Till now Release 18 has been progressing well as planned and address a wide variety of new use cases. This article presents an overview of the current status of 3GPP radio testing specifications and reports for 5G mm-wave devices in both Release 17 and Release 18. Then the progress of several major working items, including RF testing methodology enhancement for multi-Rx chain DL reception, enhanced NR support for High Speed Train (HST) scenario in frequency range 2 (FR2), RF requirements enhancement for FR2 as well as NR FR2 Over-the-Air (OTA) testing enhancement in Release 18 are discussed. Finally, the current progress and continuously discussed topics in Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) certification for 5G mm-wave devices are summarized.