Nokia offers complete innovative Base Station Subsystems (BSS) solutions for a variety of applications and environments. Base stations, including antenna and power systems, have integrated cellular transmission and can be tailored for any GSM, EDGE and WCDMA network. For years, Nokia's integrated solutions have greatly reduced operating costs. Now, this integration extends through the technologies and product generations to fully utilise the existing networks.
The GSM Base Station Subsystem (BSS) consists of the base station, base station controller, transcoder submultiplexer and cellular transmission. GSM BSS handles traffic between mobile phones and the mobile switching centre. It also establishes connection to the packet-switched subsystem that enables the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS).
(This section was paraphrased from this page of the Nokia website)
We were involved with the base station division of Nokia on two occasions:
- from June 2000 until December 2000, working on enhancements to base station maintenance software.
- from July 1996 until December 1996 , designing software to perform automatic testing of GSM base station transmitters;
Base Station Maintenance Software
The statuses of the base station transmitter / receiver modules and other subsystems are continuously monitored by a module that allows problems to be reported to remote management applications.
We were responsible for fixing bugs in the existing release as part of a product enhancement programme.
Automatic Base Station Transmitter Tester
We wrote a PC program using Borland C under DOS. It allowed GPIB-controlled test equipment to perform various transmitter parameter measurements under control of the PC, so that development and type approval testing could be performed automatically with repeatable results. The program was commissioned by the development department to combat the problem that whenever engineers evaluated a transmitter design, no two occasions would yield the same results. Automating the process and using a test scripting language to control the parameters of the tests, got around this problem completely and permitted a wide range of transmitter configurations to be tested. Using this test program it thus became possible for a design to be presented for type approval with some confidence that it would pass.
The program featured extensive user data entry facilities via hot key enabled menus, allowing arbitrary test configurations to be set up. Other details were input via disk files and results were logged in the same way.