Anritsu, a provider of test and measurement equipment to telecommunications companies, has added the new protocol test cases for IMS (IP multimedia sub-system) emergency services calls to the suite of test cases supported on the widely used ME7834L protocol conformance test (PCT) system.
Conformance with the IMS emergency services protocol is set to become an important requirement for handsets running on LTE and LTE-Advanced cellular networks in the US and elsewhere. Voice calls on these IP-based networks are normally routed via IMS architecture as a voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) service.
As IMS-based voice services gain more widespread adoption, it has become an essential requirement of public safety that IMS technology should reliably support calls to emergency services such as the police and ambulance services, as 2G and 3G network technologies already do. Members of the public will clearly want to know that they can rely on this new technology in case of emergency calls, and will put much faith into operators and handset suppliers that sufficient testing of the emergency service calls has been made.
The mobile phone industry standardisation body ‘3GPP’, which draws up standards for the tests which are used to certify conformance to 3G and 4G protocols, had previously approved the standard as ready for conformance testing of a device’s capability to make IMS emergency services calls.
Now the PTCRB North American mobile phone approvals body, which is responsible for approving that both that the test platforms implement the protocol test standards properly and the devices have implemented correctly, has approved the first IMS emergency services protocol conformance test for the Anritsu ME7834L PCT.
The Anritsu PCT already offered device certification solutions for VoLTE and SMS over IMS. This means that users of the ME7834L can use a complete suite of PTCRB-approved protocol test cases for IMS voice and text services for the latest LTE and LTE-Advanced user equipment.