Automation design for 4G mobile Internet communication systems testing

It is well known that the system testing is the bottleneck in many system design and development life cycle, due to the lack of the reliable testing system and effective test methodology. Furthermore, the rapid advancement of telecommunication technologies also brings the high obsolete rate of systems under testing, thus a well designed test system is practically useless, if it can not be developed in the least time at the lowest-cost. Automation of the system test is the key to develop the fast, adaptable and reliable test systems to meet the technical and economical challenges of testing telecommunication system. The work presented here is an automated testing system design for the Flash-OFDM™ mobile Internet communication system (R. Dolan, 2001). The novel hardware/firmware design and the nature of sophisticated software of the Flash-OFDM™ mobile Internet system have brought in a great difficulty for completing the system test in the given testing time. However, the success of developing and using the automated testing system allows us to systematically verify design functions and measure the performance of such advanced system within an adequate time period. As the results, the fault discovery rate has been significantly increased and deep hidden problems have been discovered in very early stage.