University of Surrey 5G Innovation Centre Selects Spirent

CRAWLEY, UK – September 14, 2018: Spirent Communications plc (LSE:SPT) a global provider of mobile network, service and device testing solutions, today announced that the University of Surrey 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) has selected Spirent Landslide to support cutting-edge research aimed at improving the user experience of next-generation services. The 5GIC is a member of the 5G UK Digital Strategy and one of only three leading academic research centres selected by the UK Government to advance the development of the next generation of mobile and wireless communications.

5GIC operates a testbed covering 4 km2 of indoor and outdoor environments on the University of Surrey campus and the aim of the project to is to study and provide context about users, services, networks and devices for next generation services such as broadband, mobile and IoT in the testbed. Researchers need to test the performance of innovative 5G algorithms in realistic conditions, so by deploying Spirent Landslide, the 5GIC team and industry partners can generate synthetic traffic simulating thousands of users accessing the network. They can then evaluate performance for varying levels of signaling and user traffic.

Spirent Landslide also emulates 4G networks, enabling testing of next generation services across the evolution path from 4G to 5G.

“One of our key objectives is to enable our researchers and industry partners to develop innovative algorithms and then analyse their performance in real-world scenarios,” said Regius Professor Rahim Tafazolli, Founder and Director of the University of Surrey 5GIC. “Spirent Landslide supports this objective by validating new 5G algorithms before they are deployed in the live testbed. After the algorithms are validated, Spirent Landslide generates traffic consistent with typical large mobility networks, so we can understand the potential of these algorithms to impact user experience in the real world.”

“We’re excited to support the 5G Innovation Centre’s pioneering research into next generation broadband, mobile and IoT services,” said Ross Cassan, Sr. Director of Product Marketing for Spirent’s Lifecycle Service Assurance segment. “We’ve moved aggressively to support the latest 5G standards in Landslide, building on our comprehensive support for 2G, 3G and 4G standards. We look forward to helping 5GIC and its industry partners test performance of the entire evolution path to 5G.”

Landslide is part of Spirent’s Lifecycle Service Assurance (LSA) solution suite.