DEVELOPEMENT AND TESTING OF LTE ENODEB (FEMTO CELL)

Introduction

Attocom has been successfully executing software projects in telecommunication and embedded domain with various business models. A New Jersey based wireless software and hardware OEM has been using Attocom Bangalore India based Off-shore development Center (ODC) services to meet objectives as per their product(s) roadmap. The ODC has been primarily contributing to three independent set of product lines. These products are currently being used by major carriers in the US.

Background

The business engagement with this customer started September, 2011 as an extension to their geographically distributed team. This was the first time this OEM had considered outsourcing their work to an offshore company to leverage expertise, minimize the overall cost and without compromising the quality. After successful start of the engagement, customer has converted it to an Offshore Development Center (ODC) with peak team size of 25 engineers.

Initially core team had organized various knowledge transfer sessions on their products and requirements. Subsequently the ODC team is driving the product development. The responsibility includes executing all phases of SDLC from requirement to system testing, feature enhancement, migration to other hardware platforms and Operating systems based on end customer needs. The ODC Team completed all deliverables as planned with expected quality, and met customer satisfaction even with increased expectations.

Project details:

Objective: To integrate the L2/L3 stack with Mindspeed PHY, optimize, system testing and customer demonstration in 6 months.

Description: LTE is a 3GPP wireless technology with high-speed data for mobile phones and data terminals. The standard is described in 3GPP Release 8 and 9 specifications.

The project in this case involves integration of Layer 2 and Layer 3 software with Mindspeed PHY on Mindspeed platform. This involves

  • Used the Mindspeed interface specification to integrate Layer2/3 stack.
  • Porting of the stack on to the Mindspeed platform. Mindspeed supports only the proprietary OS.
  • Bug fixes and real time optimization of the stack.
  • Development of EPC (MME, SGW and PGW) simulators to support the testing.
  • Testing the integrated stack on the Mindspeed hardware with a commercial UE.

Execution:

  • Quick Ramp up of highly motivated team comprising of diversified skills.
  • Smoothly adapted to customer’s unique processes, work culture and need of the customer.
  • Established well defined processes for assignments, tracking, and communication with customer including escalation path.
  • Customer imparted KT only to the core members of the team. After successful completion of KT, These core members took responsibility to further train new members that were added incrementally. This strategy reduced the burden on customer’s resources involvement in training.
  • Unique process where core team ramp up on entire product to unblock the issues even in the absence of key members.
  • Successfully overcome businesses concerns of an OEM towards outsourcing due to associated risk to maintain quality, schedules and value for money that impacts their business.
  • Successfully mitigated initial offshore development engagement issues/hurdles by, regular executive level meetings and adapted regular feedback and improvement mechanisms.
  • Ensured availability of trained resources for the project to mitigate the risk of potential attrition.
  • Quality of the product is ensured by following a SDLC process.

Conclusion:

The challenging assignment was completed in months, well ahead of the customer expectation. The task was achieved with a great execution of the strategy. Technical capabilities of the core team and the great coordination among the team mates contributed. This achievement resulted in winning multiple assignments from the Client.

OTHER PROJECTS.

EVDO Small Cell

Objective:  Developing the Layer2 for EVDO RevA, Developing Interface for Qualcomm L1, and Integration with the Qualcomm L1. Demonstration of end to end call setup and data transfer with Rev A compliant data transfer rate

Task Accomplished:

  • Existing code to be ported on Vxworks Platform.
  • Bringing up the BSP on the target.
  • Initialization of the Qualcomm Drivers.
  • Configuration of the RF.
  • Control channel configuration and System Broadcast start.
  • Access channel configuration and Attach procedure on access channel and control channel
  • Traffic channel configuration for SLP and Session configuration negotiation with the AT.
  • Traffic channel configuration for RLP and data transfer demonstration
  • Data speed REV A targets achievement
  • Multi AT support.(Increasing the support from 4 AT to 32 AT per cell)
  • Offshore Team size: 3

 

 

 UMTS Small Cell

Objective:  Feature development, Bug Fixing and sustenance

Task Accomplished:

  • Over the Air Ciphering feature implementation
  • SON feature Integration and Testing
  • Multi-flow feature implementation
  • Bug Fixing (Fixed around 25 bugs in last 6 months)
  • Offshore Team size: 4

 

 

Small Cell Protocol Tester

Objective:  SC protocol tester is a GUI based application to test femto cells/Small Cells. User can able to test various scenarios for CS, PS call with uplink/downlink data for multiple subscribers simultaneously. Users can select the appropriate test scenarios, events to form the test cases/ Test Suits and execute the same for defined time or defined iterations. This tool will facilitate to debug the issue using femto cell logs as well as QXDM logs.

Task Accomplished:

  • GUI Implementation
  • Blackened framework implemented using python/Java scripts
  • Test scenarios database creation (around 1500 scenarios created)
  • Automation of test scenarios using python scripts
  • Offshore Team size: 4