Femtocells

Femtocell
A technical report presented to Joseph Paradells, ph,D

by Anuar Lezama David Gonzlez G In Partial Fulllment of the Requirements for the course Department of Telematic Engineering Technical University of Catalonia November, 2008
Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009
Abstract
Femtocells are emerging both as a very promising cost-effective alternative for wireless network operators and a solid candidate to enhance the deliver of real broadband experience. Behind the femtocell idea, there are many economical and technical drivers that we are going to analyze carefully in this report. Therefore, our main aim here is to provide the reader a solid introduction to this technology not only from the technical but also from the economical standpoint. Basically, we pretend based on our research to clearly answer the following issues: What femtocells are and why do we need them? Is there any business case behind femtocells? Who are femtocells competitors? Are femtocells technically feasible? How are femtocells supposed to work? What are the main concerns regarding their deployment?
What we have today? Which are the femto-related research open issues? Nowadays, femtocells are evoking a huge interest not only among the wireless network operators but also in both academic and industrial community. In Addition, due to its closeness to 3G, we have decided to learn about this cutting-edge technology by preparing this contribution; so we expect to gain a signicant insight into this technology. We know that it is hard to cover in this length and time constrained report-like document every single detail of such a technology; but we trust that the reader will nd useful and entertained the time invested in this humble work.
Introduction
As we mentioned, the main goal of this report is to answer most the common questions that arise regarding femtocells. Nevertheless, we pursue to introduce the technology details in a very gradual fashion assuming on other hand that the reader has certain technical knowledge. In fact, we start from the assumption that the reader has some background in cellular networks and wireless communications. These fundamentals are required; otherwise the introduction of femtocells would lead us to write a very long (and probably boring and inaccurate) document. However, we have tried to make this report as simple and concise as possible. As Einstein always said: make the things as simple as possible, but no simpler. Thus, we have divided the present report in several chapters, in such a way that the reader will be progressively introduced into the subject. The rst chapter tries to justify the need of such technology. It outlines the arguments from both economical and technical point of view. Thus, this introductory chapter pretends to make clear what femtocells are and why they could be a very attractive alternative for wireless networks operators? Finally, we nished this chapter with a brief explanation of our personal motivation for selecting this technology as report topic. The second chapter brings us to the matter itself: the technical overview. We present theoretical and practical results, which support the femtocell idea. Once, the bases are established, we go over practical details which allow us to understand how very high rates are achievable using femtocells by the price of a negligible degradation in the existing macro-cell performance. Some simulations support the last. Moreover, we present a comparative analysis of the different technologies that could support the femtocell approach (3G, WiFi, WiMax). To conclude this chapter, the advantages and drawbacks of the femtocells are discussed and some insight into the possible research directions is presented. The third and last chapter is of special interest. It compiles our survey of femtocells vendors. Whereas, the previous chapter introduces the technologies that enable femtocells implementations, in this chapter we present the manufacturers and vendors of femtocells. We also have had a look on the equipments specications. Following the same line, we also nd of interest, to illustrate some current deployments that have been done by some cellular network operators. This chapter nalizes with a summary of the current standardization activities because this is another important aspect that must be taken into account when we analyze any technology.
Within the four chapter we give an overview of the instructions and a look a like during the installation procedure, basic steps are described and also some of the parts that come with the device. We used the Airave model, it is sell by Sprint and manufactured by Panasonic. Also we added some customer reviews to give an idea of the functionality and the problems that arise once it is been installed. Our conclusions are listed separately. We have tried to express our learning after completion of this report. Finally, we close this document with the list of the references we have consulted.
Contents
Abstract Introduction 1. The Business Case
1.1 Why femtocells? 1.1.1 Five Bars on your cellular-phone. 1.1.2 Keeping The Clients 1.1.3 Ofoading Trafc 1.1.4 Silent Mode 1.1.5 Security 1.1.6 Power Consumption
2. Technical Overview
2.1 Theoretical Fundamentals 2.1.1 Spatial spectral efciency 2.1.2 Indoor capacity 2.2 Femtocell performance and feasibility 2.2.1 Femtocell vs macro-cell throughput 2.2.2 Co-channel femtocell impact and additional requirements 2.2.3 Co-channel requirements for femtocells 2.2.4 Additional feasibility issues 2.3 Femtocell-to-network integration 2.3.1 Iu-b over IP 2.3.2 IMS/SIP 2.3.3 RAN-GW based UMA 2.4 Femtocell supporting technologies 2.4.1 GSM 2.4.2 UMTS 2.4.3 WiMax 2.4.4 LTE 2.4.5 TD-SCDMA 2.5 The Femtocell Choice: UMTS vs WiMAX 2.5.1 UMTS femtocell 2.5.2 WiMAX femtocell 2.6 Research directions 2.6.1 Interference Management 2.6.2 Frequency and time hopping 2.6.3 Directional antennas 2.6.4 Adaptive power control 2.6.5 MIMO femtocell
3. The Femtocell Standards

3.1 The Femtocell Market 3.1.1 Dual mode Wi-Fi phones 3.1.2 Improved Microcellular Coverage and Capacity 3.1.3 3G at lower frequencies such as 850Mhz. 3.1.4 LTE (Long Term Evolution) 3.2 Out of the Market 3.2.1 Femtocell Irrelevant 3.3 Overview
4. Equipment Overview 4.1 Customer Comments 5. Conclusions 6. References
The Business Case
When using your 3G mobile there is a big difference between placing a call in an outdoor and indoor environment called: quality. While outdoor calls can be placed very easily and standards and technology have been improved to offer more than just a call. A variety of services run perfectly to enhance function on ones 3G mobile handset like messaging, video conference, web browsing, exact geographic location, and online games between them. Since 3G technologies operate at a higher frequency problems may arrive when trying the same call in an indoor environment, let say inside a building, spa, shopping mall or even inside the house. Femtocells opens a very lucrative market since not only the mobile companies are going to benet with this new service but also the semiconductor industry who is going to develop the device. The price of introduction to a new femtocell devices carrying all the great advantages, the new services and a superior velocity, is charged to the end-user, in some of the cases may be partially subsided by the operator to reduce churn rates. The new guest at home will solve the indoor quality and will add functionality and velocity, and as an extra service the femtocell will ofoad some of the trafc from the macrocell.
Why Femtocells?
Today operators are pushing more and more for a transition to the 3G technology that offers better voice capacity and data services. At rst this handsets were too big, few models were available and had a poor battery life. With these problems solved operators still needed to deal with the poor coverage, specially inside the house where most of the calls are made, for about 40% of the use. Handset like the Blackberry or the iPhone are increasing the popularity of the 3G technology, they both create a software environment that makes a very attractive scenario for new customers who may want to try what 3G may offer. With this devices and more to come very alike, the transition may be proportional with the mass production of this new handsets, therefor coverage issue must be taken very serious. Femtocells provide a low cost solution to address this problem by bringing good 3G residential signal coverage that can be easily installed without special knowledge. When in range of the femtocell at home, the mobile phone will automatically detect it and use it as a default connection in presence to the outdoor cellsites. From now on calls can be made and received in exactly the same way before, except that this time the signals are sent encrypted from the femtocells via the broadband Ip Network to one of the mobile operators main switching centers. The same procedure is followed for the receiving calls, and all standard features, such as call divert, text messaging, web browsing, are available as well in the same way, perhaps data services may operate with a better quality because of the short range with the device. The following is a list of the most important features femtocell brings along, as we may see there are advantages for both subscriber and cellphone carriers.
Better Signal Churn Rate Ofoading Trafc Silent Mode Security
Easy Installation Battery Life
Five Bars on your cellular-phone.

The use of a cellular phone in an Indoor and Outdoor situation can make a big difference in terms of quality. Many things can degrade the signal from the cell tower like trees and intervening buildings, while brick walls and wallboard supports can block them permanently creating a dead zone of dropped and missed calls. One solution to these problems is a device called femtocell, which is sold only by cellphone carriers. Femtocells are mobile phone base-stations with a very low power consumption, connected
using standard broadband DSL or cable service into the mobile operators network. With a lower cost than outdoor service, femtocells offer excellent mobile phone coverage at home for voice and data services. This femtocells act as tiny cell towers in the home and make the possibility to place calls over the local broadband DSL connection. The Femtocells are very much alike WiFi broadband modems, but unlike WiFi, these devices use an authorized radio spectrum that must be operated and controlled by a Mobile Network Operator. Some vendors are incorporating the three features in the single box this is Wi, DSL and Mobile.
Keeping The Clients

Massive production has driven down prices for mobile handset, a big variety of this models can
be bought almost anywhere. There is no need to buy them directly form an specic mobile operators, one can nd an open mobile that can work with any SIM card from any operator. The problem arrives when a customer is experiencing bad reception or a bad quality service from an operator, the customer, if not with contract subscription service with the operator, then can easily change to another operator by just buying another SIM card from a different operator. For this case the price for switching to another service is the price of buying another SIM card to a different operator, the price for an operator to attract new customers is quite more than this. But there is the case where mobiles handsets are given away for free when making a subscription, this is the result of a wide market and the battle operators are having to attract/keep subscribers. Femtocells are mobile phone base-stations connected via DSL that will work with only one operator, that means that when installed at home active members must be with the same operators. So Femtocell are not only enhancing services or delivering a better quality signal but are keeping the active members of the femtocell to an specic mobile operator. It will then be harder for the customer to change to another mobile operator, thus one active user may have to agree with the other active users and switch to another service.
When an asset becomes a commodity and changing to another option is complicated or complex in a way, it has been seen that customers will continue to use that asset for as long as the switching procedure is simple and within a low cost. When acquiring a femtocell from an operator, free calls may be given or very low tariff may be applied when connected to it. This may drive a different appreciation to the use of mobile communications with a very low cost, as a result keeping the clients.
Ofoading Trafc
Benets may also be seen when talking about the capacity of the macrocell. Studies have been made regarding the usage of the mobile devices by the users and the frequency of this in different places. There is a considerable percentage of the time where the mobile is used at home (according to the Femtocell Primer 40% of the time) . If some of this percentage can be ofoaded from the macrocell a big difference can be seen when talking about the capital investment that is been saved. The cost of a femtocell is with no comparison to the one of a base-station, which not only be the invest of the equipment but also a network management plan and perhaps some landowner negotiation. Since the femtocell enforces the active users to be with the same operators and when in range the calls me be in some times free or with little charges, the use of the mobile is promoted to be used more at home rather than outside where the tariff may increment considerably. This may be a perfect solution for the operator if there is a region where the trafc is dense and some of this trafc needs to be routed elsewhere and avoiding the installation of another base-station.
Silent Mode
Since working with very little power femtocell do not mess with the outdoor signals. When activated the femtocell will listen to outdoor signal and decide what power lever is adequate to avoid protuberance with the outdoor and still be at higher availability.
Security
Femtocells uses an IPsec channel to send the information to the core network, so actually it is safer to use the handset inside rage than outside, also computers may be working in a much safer mode.
Power Consumption
The mobiles and laptops when working in the femtocell operate with much less power (10% of cordless phones) thus the battery life is extended.
Personal Motivation
We decided to work on femtocells because is a relatively very recent technology, which is so close to the matter of our course: 3G networks and their evolution. Moreover, femtocells networks offer a very attractive research line and to work on this subject will result interesting. Nowadays products come along with a variety of attributes or features, the integration of various devices into one is the trend of technology. We have seen the conversion of simple mobiles handsets that used to be more accurate with the denitions of mobile phone. Todays models are all in one devices with Mp3 players, digital cameras, web browsers, GPS navigation, instant messaging with Hotmail or Gmail services, social networks applications or video-games. It is quite obvious that femtocells is not going to be a one function device. It is a quite new product that to our point of view can evolve into greater services. Going inside some of the manufacturers and products designers, we took a look to the future of femtocells and found some prototypes, for example in Motorola they are adapting a touch screens and a virtual phone application all inside a Photo Frame look a like display. Seems to be the evolution or the transition to use more the mobile phone rather than the xed line. It is quite interesting to see what the future may bring in the communications area, more to see in the mobile sector where advances are been done quite fast.
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Technical Overview
Up to this point, we have analyzed in chapter 1 the business and economical drivers which have motivated the manufactures and network operators to bed for femtocells. Clearly, all those facts are very important but they lead us to the next issue: home base stations represent an attractive business case but are they technically feasible according to that model and perhaps more important, are they compatible and easy to implement in the todays wireless networks? In this chapter we provide some theoretical facts and results, which support the femtocell idea. Once the fundamentals are established, implementation issues arise naturally as the next topic to consider to the light of the existing wireless networks technologies. A comparative analysis highlighting advantages and drawbacks is almost irresistible. Moreover we have illustrated every section of this chapter with practical simulations results and other previous work we have found in the literature such that we can accompany our writing with actual and cutting edge literature.
Fundamentals
In this rst section we aim to give the reader some intuition over several theoretical results we consider very important to grasp before boarding the practical considerations related to femtocells implementation.
Spatial Spectral Efciency

As far as we know, the use of radio resources in terms of efciency has been continuously improved along the last 100 years. The quotation at the beginning of this chapter states the Coopers Law, which give us an idea about the pace in which the information transmission rate over the radio interface has been increased. Basically we want to emphasize that such an improvement has been made due to several factors: The use of wider radio frequency bands, Spatial division, i.e. by dividing the available spectrum in smaller sub-bands, Higher order modulations allows transmission of more bits per time unit and, Smart channel coding schemes,
Nevertheless, the real improvement in the wireless capacity has been achieved in practice by reducing the coverage area. To the best of our knowledge, the theoretical upper bound in the capacity of a communication channel is given by the Shannons formula:
C = Blog (1+SINR) EQ. 21

Over certain thresholds, SINR increments do not imply a signicant enhancement in the capacity due to logarithmic nature of EQ. 2.1. Although smaller cell sizes imply shorter distances (and so, higher received power), also interference is increased in both downlink and uplink within traditional cellular networks. Nevertheless, linear capacity increment can be achieved by increasing the bandwidth. Since the bandwidth is a limited resource which must be shared among different services and systems, indenitely increase of bandwidth is not an option. A possibility is to reuse spatially the same bandwidth. Cellular networks take advantage of this and perform an efcient spatial reuse of spectrum. Based on this approach, we have seen how macro, micro and pico-cells have appeared successively and tend to increment the capacity of wireless networks. The idea behind femtocells its precisely that, increase as high as possible the area spectral efciency. The area spectral efciency, denes the sum of the maximum average data rates 2 per unit bandwith per unit supported by a cells base station. [bits/seg]/[Hzm ] As a matter of fact, the most signicant increment in wireless capacity comes from the spectral efciency improvement. Thus, reuse bandwidth as much as possible, is clearly the most efcient way to enhance the system capacity. This is the rst theoretical concept we want to stress. Much more can be said about this subtle topic, but having in mind this idea is enough to continue.
Indoor capacity
We mention in the last point that for traditional cellular wireless networks reducing the transmitter-receiver distance (small cell sizes) results in higher useful signal power but also in higher interference level. Since femtocell devices are designed mainly to operate in indoor conditions, high penetration losses plays an important role because they insulate the femtocell transmission from surrounding interference which comes from the macro and micro-cells. Its important to note that the indoor structure itself blocks not only the interference coming form the external cellular network (from now on, downlink interference) but also blocks the interference that the femtocells user creates to others cellular networks users (from now on, uplink interference). FIG. 2.1 shows a hypothetical indoor location having a home base station inside. Due to the high wall losses, blue areas present high SINR from femtocell transmission perspective. Similarly, and due to the moderate femtocells power transmission level, green zone exhibit a good SINR from the macro-cell transmission perspective. Of course, the last can be truer or not depending on the actual distance between the femtocell and the nearer base stations.
Typical Femtocell Layout High losses come from walls, doors, windows, etc. Moderate to low values Moderate to very high values FIG. 2.1 SINR reference zones from the femtocells transmission perspective.
This point in also very important and so it will be analyzed carefully later on. By the moment, accepting an in-door's low level of interference; The SINR experienced by the femtocells user becomes moderate to very high because the distance is actually very short. Moreover, taking into account that the femtocell coverage area is reduced, the number of users the associated to the femtocell is expected to be very low, ranging from 1 to 4 users. Thus, we have a signicant capacity, which could be shared by few users; the per-user capacity within the femtocell is very high. Summarizing, we have passed from a situation in which indoor users have a reduced throughput (i.e. very poor service experience) to a new scenario in which indoor users will experience a very high rate; in fact, indoor users will experience in general better throughput than external users under the femtocell coverage. Another interesting assumption we can make is to consider the fact that indoor users have very low mobility while external users could be moving at high speeds. While from the wireless network services reliability perspective, mobility management is often a differential key point among competitor technologies; from the throughput standpoint it is clear that high mobility in general does not favor the delivery of very high transmission rates. From the last analysis, some questions arise naturally. We mentioned that in general the impact of the femtocell to the existing cellular network and vice versa is not signicant. Doesnt it? Up to here, we have argued it based mainly on two important theoretical points: the high spectral efciency and the indoor capacity. The next section, deals with real numbers and practical results to further support that reasoning. This section presents and comments some important results taken from recent conference papers and communications magazines. The objective is to support with simulations results the theoretical points previously argued.
Femtocell Performance and Feasibility

Femtocell vs Macrocell Throughput
The rst point we treated in the last section was the femtocell throughput. Basically we claim that spectral efciency improvement is the biggest benet of femtocells. In order to illustrate that, we consider rstly, one of the example settings proposed on [1]. We stress that this rst simulation, tries to remark the huge gains we can achieve by improving the spatial spectral efciency especially for the case of data trafc rather than voice. The mentioned setting considers an OFDMA network with 100 active users. In order to compare the performance, rst scenario consists of a macrocell serving all 100 users simultaneously. Second case, take into account the same number of active users equally distributed among 50 femtocells. Figures 2.2 and 2.3 show the performance obtained in both cases. System parameters setting is shown in gure 2.2. To the best of our knowledge, gure 2.2 is quite illustrative. The learning we can obtain is twofold. First, as expected, we have larger gains for the case of data compared with voice trafc. This is due to the fact that voice trafc is in general a narrowband service. Macrocell setting is able to provide the service to all users. Femtocells, of course, serve to their users also with a minor gain of about 0.6 [bps/Hz]. Second, due to variable nature of data trafc, the gain obtained with
FIG. 2.2 CDF of the normalized per user throughput. Normalization femtocells is larger. This is due to is taken over the whole system bandwidth the fact that broadband services available in existing macro-cellular networks only schedules the best users for transmission. In other hand, femtocells can provide data services to all users achieving a gain about 2 [bps/Hz]. Thus, we would expect a total system gain as follows: Total System Gain ( 1.8 + 0.6 ) [bps/Hzuser]100[user] = 240 [bps/Hz]
The last gain can be expressed as effective rate improvement considering for instance a common OFDMA network working on a total bandwidth of 20 MHz. In such case we would have: Potential Brute Throughput Gain 240[bps/Hzuser]20[Mhz] = 4.8 [Gbps]
Figure 2.3 shows the sum throughput for this example. FIG. 2.3 CDF of the normalized sum throughput. Normalization is taken over the whole system bandwidth
Co-channel Femtocell Impact and Additional Requirements

The second point argued in the previous section was the indoor-outdoor mutual impact. We stressed that typical indoors losses plays an important role in that sense. The following results taken from [3] are an excellent illustration that quanties the impact of the femtocells in a CDMA-based network in both downlink and uplink. In addition, we comment in this point some of the most relevant key requirements for cochannel operation because they are also important technical aspects. The main results taken from [3] we are interested in are the measures of femtocells impact to the existing macro-cell network. The simulations considered include a CDMA based wireless network. Besides of the whole set of parameters shown in table 2.1, what is very interesting for us in this particular paper is the way in which femtocells isolation was modeled. The author was very careful in the way he modeled the radio propagation losses for the femtocells surroundings. Since we precisely stress that point in the last section we nd this particular result very illustrative. We have to say that many other common simulation features were considered in this work: Directional antennas, Shadow fading statistics for users, Operation at 3 [dB] from Shannon capacity limit, Variable resolution for indoor (0.6 [m]) and outdoors (40 [m]), The well known 3.84 [MHz] channel bandwidth was used and
Wrapping cell to avoid edge effects and obtain reliable results.

Main simulation parameters in [3] Outdoor path loss Modeled as 28+35log10(d) [dB] where d is the distance from the base station in meters. Modeled as 38.5+20log10(d) + Lwalls [dB] where the wall loss Lwalls is explicitly modeled (15/10/7 [dB] for external/internal/light internal walls respectively, 3 [dB] for doors, and 1 [dB] for windows.
Outdoor path loss
TABLE. 2.1 Propagation losses considered for outdoors and indoors Figure 2.4 and 2.5 show a typical throughput distribution for both uplink and downlink and from the femtocells and macrocell point of view.
FIG. 2.4 Throughput distribution in the area around a femtocell. a) downlink b) uplink c) home model Figure 2.4 and 2.5 show a typical throughput distribution example for both uplink and downlink in a home where a femtocell base station is located. We can appreciate that average throughput around 30 [Mbps] are easily achievable in indoors for downlink. Even higher rates can be reached in uplink. Its very interesting to note that in both cases the lower attentions in the structure produce lower rates inside the home for downlink and outside for uplink from the femtocell perspective. Zones close to windows are easily distinguished in gure 2.4 a) and b).
Even more interesting is the analysis of gure 2.5 where the throughput is considered from the macrocell point of view. As expected macrocells rates, are higher close to base stations both in uplink and downlink. Nevertheless, it can be noted that femtocells close to base station achieve in general lower rates that the ones close to the cell edge or the ones out of the main lobe of the antennas. Of course, peaks in gure 2.5 correspond to the positions where femtocells are located.
FIG. 2.5 Throughput distribution in the area around a macrocell. a) downlink b) uplink
Before to go over the results, gure 2.6 depicts the overall simulation layout indicating the exact positions of the femtocells within each cell. Figure 2.7 and 2.8 shows the throughputs CDFs for the downlink of both macro- and femtocells with different number of N active femtocells. Simulations results make clear that the impact caused by 10 and 100 active femtocells is minimal. This results is very important for the femtocell deployment in this cochannel scenario. Thus, (considering the results of the previous point), very high gains in the sum system throughput can be achieved at a minimal cost in terms of interference in the downlink. It is also clear from the results that the theoretical femtocell rate is very high as we also noted in the previous section.
FIG. 2.6 Simulated scenario in [3]
Similarly to the downlink case, femtocell users experience very high rates in uplink with marginal losses in the macrocell performance. A different between downlink and uplink evaluation arises when the number of femtocells per cell is increased from 10 to 100. In that case, the maximum allowed interference per user equipment is reduced by a factor of 10. Therefore, the SINR can drop up to 10 [dB], resulting in a reduction in uplink throughput.
FIG. 2.7 CDFs for the downlink throughput 3[dB from the capacity limit throughput i [Mbps]
FIG. 2.8 CDFs for the uplink throughput 3[dB] from the capacity limit throughput in [Mbps]
Co-channel Requirements For Femtocells

Now we outline some comments regarding key aspects required to successfully deploy the femtocells under the co-channel scheme. We want to emphasize that we have address the cochannel case because is the scenario in which the spatial spectral efciency can be effectively increase from the network operator standpoint. Many details have to be carefully considered but we are going to go over two of the most important ones with the aim to highlight that technical feasibility of femtocell not only have to consider pure theoretical issues but also implementation issues. Many of those, are particular for the network technology behind. However, some of them are common to almost any access technology. In particular we are to briey discuss auto-conguration and public access.
Auto-conguration Since many parameters depends on the local radio conditions, neighboring cells and distance from the co-channel macrocells, an agile adaptation to the surrounding network is a key point in terms of inter-working. In order to illustrate, we will consider the case of an UMTS network. Given the nature of a CDMA network, Cell-ID, location and routing area codes, scrambling codes, neighbor list and powers for pilot and data must be congured automatically. Of course authentication of the femtocell is required. Previous parameters are all very important but from our perspective, power control is the most important one especially in a CDMA network. In [3], the author proposes a method for power control for pilot and data that ensures a constant femtocell radius in the downlink and a lowpredenable uplink performance impact. The proposed method are not going to be detailed here but we want to stress the main idea we got after reading the that methodology. Basically, the main target is to ensure a constant cell range independent of the distance of the macrocell. Achieve a very small cell radius to only cover the users home is important in order to minimize handovers from passing users outside. Public access Not so obvious, public access appears to be important also. Despite of some other
implications, since that means that any user can access wireless services via any femtocell using a private back-haul connection public access could avoid excessive interference coming from users close to the femtocell coverage area. Clearly, another implication arises when we consider that a higher number of user use the same back-haul infrastructure. QoS requirements must be taking into account specially for the case of delay sensitive trafcs.
Additional feasibility issues.

Finally, to conclude the performance and feasibility section, we list some additional technical challenges that need to be considered for the femtocells deployment.
Security
Essentially, since femtocells are connected to a public IP infrastructure, serious security issues arise, All those must be considered during the femtocell network deployment. The authentication process must be performed following new security protocols adapted to both IP backbone and the particularities of the different mobile networks (GSM, UMTS, WiMax).
Security ser vices authentication, privacy
like and
integrity of the data must be guaranteed. Figure 2.9 depicts this generic scenario. In the gure we also illustrate the most basic architecture under which femtocells deployed. FIG. 2.9 Femtocell authentication process model. Provisioning The provisioning is a very important aspect from the users point of view. We all know that one of the most important features of the existing WiFi devices is its easy installation and provisioning. Nevertheless, unlike the WiFi access point, femtocell devices must be integrated into the overlaying mobile network without the user participation. Of course, all security issues must be clearly understood in order to avoid frauds. Smart and robust registration and authentication procedures must be dened to allow the users to easily set up their femto-devices. In this context, use of SIM cards arises as an attractive possibility to self provisioning the femto-devices. Timing and synchronization Synchronization is required in order to have successful handover between base stations. Synchronization is also required to align received signals to minimize multi-access interference and ensure a tolerable carrier offset. Candidate calibration strategies include GPS and IEEE 1588. GPS is more accurate, and provides both time and location data. However, GPS is more expensive and relies on GPS system availability. Since femtocell are designed mainly for indoor, GPS is not suitable since it requires line of sight from the satellite. IEEE 1588, Precision Timing Protocol (PTP), is a more suitable solution for Femtocell devices. It uses a master-slave structure. There is a master clock in the network providing timing reference to the slave clocks at Femto-APs. The timing signal is transmitted over IP/ Ethernet backhaul. IEEE 1588 is a low-cost standalone solution that achieves sub-microsecond accuracy. will be
Handover The handover process also suppose a very challenging issue especially for the case where the user is passing from the macro-cell to the femtocell. The handover protocols must deal with the following issues: Avoid multiple handover Transparency to the user It should consider cross-layer cooperation to be efcient in the radio resource management and interference mitigation. We have seen so far that 4G specications take into consideration the presence of femtocells. Portability The portability of the femtocells is another interesting problem. A subscriber could carry the femtocell device to any point within its mobile operator network coverage but basically two conditions would be required: 1. First, a broadband internet connection must be available and capable to transport (with the required QoS) both the authentication process and subsequent signalling. 2. Second, the previous condition implies that the xed transport must have some kind of agreement with the mobile operator.
Another scenario is when the femtocell is moved to a placed where there is not coverage of its mobile operator. In addition to the previous conditions, additional regulations are required subject, of course, to the technical feasibility. Location Tracking Government mandated Emergency-911 services require operators to provision femtocells for transmitting location information during emergency calls. Ethical/legal dilemmas can arise on whether a femtocell should service macro-cell users with poor outdoor coverage for making emergency calls if they are located within its radio range. In open access networks this problem can be solved by handoff. Closed access femtocells should be provisioned to allow communication with unsubscribed users in the event of emergencies.
Femtocell-to-Network Integration
We have seen so far a theoretical introduction supporting the technical feasibility of femtocells and we have also reviewed some interesting simulations results taken from the literature to illustrate the potential enhancement wireless networks operators can obtain from femtocells. This section starts our trip across of some technical details involved in the femtocells deployment. Perhaps the most relevant aspect of femtocells is the way in which they are going to be connected to the wireless network operators core network throughout an external IP network. We have already seen many of the challenges involved in, but we have not described that interconnection itself. As far as we know, traditional wireless networks are mainly hierarchical. In such a scheme, a centralized entity, lets say the RNC (Radio Network Controller) in UMTS provide a reliable control and management to dozens even hundreds of macrocells. Are current networks ready to handle thousands or tens of thousands femtocells all connected over the unsecured and untrusted public Internet? To accomplish the last goal, the interconnection of the femtocells to the core network plays a very important role. At the beginning there were several competing approaches to how femtocells connected into the mobile operators network, with different vendors promoting each solution. Although all the alternatives used a broadband IP to a femtocell gateway, the split of functionalities and communications schemes varied. The main focal point of standardization is the Iu interface, which separates the 3G core network from the radio access network. After discussion at the Femto Forum and the 3GPP standards committees, it was agreed to use the Iu interface into the operators core networks and a new Iu-h interface was dened for the connection between the femtocell and femtocell gateway. Figure 2.10 illustrate the most general femtocell system architecture. Thus, the main aim is to describe and list the features of the most promising proposals that have been done in the industry. In order to clearly illustrate each approach, we will use the well-known UMTS architecture. The most relevant proposals up to date are: 1. Iu-b over IP 2. IMS/SIP 3. RAN-GW-based: UMA
Before describing these three alternatives it is helpful to consider the key operator requirements for femtocell device-to-core network connectivity: Full-Service Transparency: The approach must enable the operator to provide all existing and planned services to handsets when connected via the femtocell, whether those services are currently circuit-based or
FIG. 2.10 Femtocell system architecture. packet-based. Low Deployment Cost and Network Disruption: The approach must enable the operator to deploy femtocells with relatively low up-front costs, as well as cause a low level of disruption to the existing operations of an operators core and macro networks. Ability to Scale to Support Mass Market Deployments: The approach must be able to costeffectively scale to support the deployment of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of femtocells. Rapid Path to Standardization: The approach must allow for a rapid path to standardization for the interface between femtocells and the core network in order to support a robust femtocell market. Now a brief description of each proposal is presented and a graphical illustration is shown in gure 2.11.
FIG. 2.11 Femtocell Device-to-Core Network Connectivity Approaches.
Iu-b over IP
This approach reuses the same cell site protocols as for 3G macro cells running over IP. Each femtocell is connected to the RNC via the standard Iu-b interface. This has been dened in the 3GPP Release 5. The Iu-b protocol stack is encapsulated within the IP signaling, also called a tunneling Iu-b. This allows existing RNC vendors to reuse their products with minimum redevelopment to support femtocells. Nevertheless, some issues have been outlined with this approach. Currently there is not a protocol to secure the connection between the femtocell and the RNC. By the moment network security is handled by the IP security (IPsec) protocol. Often, Iu-b interface implementations are not standard because many vendors have added additional proprietary functions. This difcult the idea of multi-vendors for femtocells. Macrocellular UTRANs are not designed to handle thousands of cell sites moves and changes per day. The standard Iu-b interface is used for synchronization and requires very high quality communication between the femtocell and the RNC. Typical shortcomings in public Internet like jitter, delay and packet loss are not allowed.
RNC must be scaled to service the tens of thousands of Node-Bs that would be deployed in a femtocell network. Figure 2.12 shows the associated protocol stack.
FIG. 2.12 Network Interface, NBAP and OAM support
IMS/SIP This approach breaks from the existing network architecture and embraces the protocols of an all-IP network as envisaged by the 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). These include Voice over IP (VoIP) using the Session Initiated Protocol (SIP), with the RNC function fully now integrated into the femtocell. This architecture is more aligned with the WiMAX approach, which is IP-based from the ground up. It is also the approach that looks increasingly likely to be favored by 3GPP2 for CDMA2000 evolution. Figure 2.13 shows the protocol stack that could ts for the last two approaches.
RAN-GW based UMA

The approach to integrating this technology into an existing network is to place a UMA access network (UMAN) alongside the existing radio access network (RAN). The interface into the existing core network is through the UMA network controller (UNC), which is the equivalent to the 3G RNC. Current UMA-enabled handsets communicate through a WiFi access point across an existing broadband connection to the UNC. IP tunnelling techniques are used to transparently extend all circuit and packet-based services. The UMA client function moves into the femtocell allowing any standard 2G/3G phone to communicate with the network through the UMAN. The advantage here is that this technology is now standardized and is designed for integrating millions of end-user devices into the mobile network.
Since this architecture removes the RNC, the functionality associated with this is moved into the base-station (RLC/RRC tasks to support radio channel set up, etc). As such, the femtocell is now more intelligent or autonomous and is often re-named as an access point. FIG. 2.13 Network interface, collapsed RNC and SIP
Finally, what we have found in our research is that most of the manufacturers are choosing the RAN Gateway approach as the methodology under which their femtocell devices are going to be connected to the core network. Table 2.2 shows a very useful comparison among the approaches previously described based on the arguments discussed.
Iub over IP Service Transparency Initial Cost/Disruption Ability to Scale Path to Standards
Excellent Good Poor Poor
Iub over IP
Excellent Excellent Excellent Excellent
Iub over IP
Poor Poor Excellent Good
TABLE. 2.2 Comparison of Device-to-Core Network Connectivity Approaches
Femtocells Supporting Technologies
Getting back to the gure 2.10, we have described so far the connectivity alternatives between the femtocell and the mobile operators core network. In that description we used the particular case of UMTS most of the time because we are in fact more familiar with such standard. Nevertheless, we have to cover in this section the alternatives radio technologies for the air interface. UMTS is indeed the most obvious solution but it is not the only one. Thus the aim in this section is to make clear what are the possible implementations for femtocell from the radio interface standpoint. Of course, detailed discussion of how those technologies works is out of scope.
GSM
GSM is the dominant global mobile phone technology. Originally developed and adopted as a European standard, it has successfully been exported to almost every country worldwide. This digital system uses TDMA to share up to 8 callers on each 200KHz carrier. Its mostly developed at 800 MHz and 1800 MHz frequencies, with North America operating at 1900 MHz. We have found that the feasibility of home base stations for GSM has been studied long time ago. We were especially interested in the work done by Silventoinen in [6] and [7] where the problems of how allocate frequencies in a home base stations and frequency hopping were addressed. Since GSM is the most extended mobile communications specication, its potential must be always taken into account for the case of femtocells but we consider that since GSM was designed mainly for voice services, GSM femtocells will not be the favorite option for vendors and manufacturers.
UMTS
This 3G radio system evolved from GSM and continues to reuse the same core network and services. It uses wide-band CDMA to share hundreds of callers on each 5MHz carrier. Most UMTS phones are also GSM capable and can handover between the systems. Over 200 GSM networks have also deployed UMTS. A global frequency allocation at 2100 MHz is used almost worldwide with few exceptions. We must mention that the enhanced versions of UMTS, lets say HSDPA and HSUPA are open possibilities for the femtocell devices. Due to its importance, we are going to go over additional UMTS femtocell details later on.
WiMAX
A relatively new entrant, which uses OFDM to achieve high spectrum efciency and handle multi-path situations effectively. This systems offers high speed internet data services without specifying services such as voice or text messaging, effectively offering a broadband internet connection similar to DSL or Cable Modem. As with other cellular systems, it requires licensed spectrum and many cell towers to cover wide areas. Some high prole networks are rolling out WiMax nowadays. Following the IEEE 802 philosophy, WiMax only denes physical and MAC layer and this could be a potential advantage over its competitors.
Numerous femtocells impact studies has been also made. In particular, [4] presents simulations results showing that signicant areal capacity gain can be achieve via intense spatial reuse of the wireless spectrum also for the WiMax case. As we will see later on, WiMax femtocells is another promising alternative for the femtocell business.
LTE
The last alternative we want to mention is LTE. The last member of the GSM family, attempt to achieve even higher throughput and performance levels. This systems adopts the same OFDM radio technology as WiMax and has many similarities to it. The threat of WiMax is said to have brought forward the schedule for LTE, with operators targeting commercial deployment in 2010. It is likely that LTE will reuse existing 2G and 3G spectrum in the long term, but additionally operator would look to the digital dividend, where analogue TV systems are being superseded by more spectrum efcient digital TV, thus releasing substantial spectrum assets in frequency band below 1GHz which could be use for LTE in the long term. Clearly, LTE is another very important possibility for femtocells deployment specially if we take into account its promising data rates and versatility.
TD-SCDMA
TD-SCDMA is yet another radio interface variation included in the 3G standards, developed and promoted by China. China Mobile is the world largest mobile operator (by subscribers), has been mandated to adopt it as its 3G standard. It is a TDD rather than FDD interface and so only needs one spectrum frequency range, which is shared alternatively between uplink and downlink.
This makes it easier to nd a suitable frequency slot compared to FDD which requires a matched pair of frequency bands. One of our motivations to include TD-SCDMA here is that picoChip, a leading vendor of femtocell chipset, announced a TD-SCDMA chipset ad femtocell reference design in January 2008. So, there is a signicant market to justify that investment. At present, China is still a 2G mobile country, although a very large one. Nevertheless, we have read that due to many circumstances (technical, political and economical) it seems unlikely that CDMA (and hence TD-SCDMA) has a long-term growth path in China. In fact we have verify from internet that in U.S (another important market) Verizon Wireless, the largest operator has announced its plans to evolved to LTE. Spring, another huge operator, has invested billions in WiMax. So, as conclusion we think that TD-SCDMA would be a potential option for femtocells only in China for a short term. Again, since we are talking of China, it is likely that some vendors will offer their solutions.
The Femtocell Choice: UMTS or WiMax

The last section we discussed briey the potential alternatives for femtocells deployment. In this section we focus specically on two particular ones: UMTS and WIMAX femtocells. We decided to go deeper into these two possible implementations because we have found that they are the most promising ones by the moment. The idea in this section is therefore to review their features, advantages and disadvantages such that a comparative analysis can be done.
UMTS Femtocells
We have learned that WCDMA is a interference-limited technology in which an accurate and fast power control is the key to effectively increase the capacity of the cell. Wireless operators have recognized the important of deliver broadband multimedia services to the users with adequate QoS. In this context we are talking of IPTV, video telephony and movie-on-demand. It has been also recognized that the demand for such a services is mainly indoors. We have discussed so far the advantages of the femtocells for indoor coverage from technical and others points of view. Time ago, some drawbacks for femtocell deployment were: the lack of appropriate hardware to simulate the functionalities of a base station in a cheap and small device. Now, the situation has changed and UMTS has a tremendous potential in this growing indoor wireless access market. The particular case of UMTS femtocells have some important drivers we want to stress.
Competition: Its clear that offer broadband wireless access at home could open the possibility to offer the users attractive service bundles, voice, data and television as the triple play. Backward Compatibility: This solution does not require the subscriber to purchase an expensive dual-mode handset for getting indoor and outdoor coverage from a single handheld device. Threat from voice over IP, voice-over-WiFi: The threat from unlicensed technologies, which are currently eating up the revenue share of licensed spectrum operators, will get reduced if cheaper wireless coverage can be provided indoors Threat from wireless technologies like WiMax: WiMax based solutions, which are able to provide higher data rates than UMTS are also gaining ground for indoor wireless access market but UMTS have some clear advantages over WiMax. Apart from being able to work without requiring a dual-mode handset, UMTS would be able to provide better security on the radio interface and a unied billing solution to the subscriber for outdoor and indoor access Increased Network Coverage and Capacity Increased Customer Loyalty: A customer that purchases a femtocell will not abandon the operators service so easily. On other hand, some technical challenges must be overcome to successfully deploy the UMTS femtocell network. Subscriber BoM cost: Pricing of the femtocell needs to be kept in the range of $200 or even lesser to make it a viable FMC solution. Network Integration Model: As we discussed earlier, the network integration plays a key role in order to achieve an acceptable technical performance according to users expectations. Upgrades: With the new technologies like HSUPA evolving over a period of time, a femtocell has to be made upgradeable to support these new requirements. Access Control: We have seen how public access can be benet in many aspects while another issues must be claried. Private access would also have some advantages. Nowadays, This kind of access restriction mechanism is not provided by the standard UMTS protocols and therefore some innovation is required to make this happen. RF Planning: The RF planning needs to be done very carefully for deriving the desired benets from femtocell environment. We have also seen how co-channels femtocells can be deployed with minimal impact; nevertheless, the possibility to deploy additional band for femtocell must be consider. Radio Resource Management: The radio resource management strategy and algorithms need to be developed specically for the indoor deployment model. We have commented that smart algorithms must be designed taking into account the particularities of the macro-to-femto cell handover and viceversa, lower call drops and QoS.
Radio Emission Aspects: Radio Emission levels in the indoor environment needs to be kept much lower to avoid any undesirable impact on human beings. Automatic Conguration: We have commented that dynamic conguration of the femtocell is a very important point. In the UMTS context, this is specially important because the particular setting of any femto-device could have a big impact in the performance of the macro cell and hence in the rest of femtocells. Customer Support Model: How to deliver support to the femtocells users is a model that has not been dened clearly. From the users perspective, telephony is a service which has offered the highest availability, so femtocells must accomplish these levels of reliability. Others: Finally, regulatory restrictions, security and synchronization also add complexity to the design of the UMTS femtocells. As we will see in the next chapter, currently available UMTS femtocells offer ingenious solutions to many of the points we are highlighting here. However, there is a lot to do. In the research directions section, we will address many of the elds in which femtocells could be effectively improved. To conclude this particular survey over UMTS femtocells, we have to say that there are two aspects in which UMTS femtocell business case is a little bit delayed with respect of WiFi and WiMax. First of all, time to market is very important and in this sense WiFi has a big advantage. WiFi is almost an omnipresent network so femtocells vendors must be very aggressive to promote this solution to the point in which (why not) laptops carry femto modules inside. On other hand, the data rates set up another warning. Today WiMax can offer in realistic conditions up to 30 Mbps so UMTS evolution must assure to compete with such an opponent. Figure 2.14 shows a typical UMTS femtocell device with the basic features.
FIG. 2.14 Typical UMTS femtocell device solution.

WiMax Femtocells
WiMAX, based on IEEE 802.16 standard, provides a strong mobility platform to support high-speed mobile broadband services. Similarly to many other high speed wireless networks, WiMAX also suffers poor base stations. Theoretically we have seen that WiMAX can operate in any frequency below 66 GHz current deployments are based on 2.3 GHz, 2.5 GHz and 3.5 GHz frequency ranges. Femtocells or home access point, as it does in 3 G networks, can solve this problem. It makes sense to deploy WiMAX femtocells to provide better in-premise coverage and reduce macro network deployment costs. WiMAX femtocell is a system comprising customer premise equipment (CPE) known as WiMAX femto access point and other additional network functions. Thus in this section we aim to discuss the particular requirements for WiMAX femtocells. Handover: This use case refers to a scenario when a WiMAX subscriber initiates a session in macro/femto network and then moves to different femto/macro network of the same service provider. The expectation here is to have a seamless session transfer from a macro to femto environment and vice-versa. Non-interference with macro coverage area: This use case refers to a scenario when a subscriber deploys a WFAP at his home. The home is not within the coverage area of his WiMAX service provider. In a worst-case scenario his home could be in the coverage area of another WiMAX service provider. The expectation here is that the WiMAX femtocells does not radiate any radio frequency (RF), as it is not licensed to do so in the coverage area of other service providers. Inter-Radio Access Technology session continuity: This use case refers to a scenario when a subscriber is accessing a service over WiFi network. To improve the quality of service he decides to switch his session to WiMAX network. The expectation here is that the WiMAX femtocell in coordination with the core network facilitates session handover from WiFi network to WiMAX network.
Visitor access: This use case refers to a scenario when a subscriber has a WiMAX femtocell installed at his home and another subscriber that belongs to the same service provider visits and tries to access the WiMAX femtocell. The expectation here is that WiMAX femtocell is congurable to allow visitors to access services through the visited WiMAX femtocell. Feature Spectrum Description WiMAX femtocell operates over licensed spectrum using standard WiMAX wireless air interface and protocol. WiMAX femtocell can have standalone forms (similar to WiFi access points) or it could be integrated with DSL or cable modems. A WiMAX femtocell should implement DSL forums dened TR069 protocol to allow an operator to remotely manage a WiMAX femtocell. It must allow an operator to disable/enable the air interface service, remotely. A WiMAX femtocell should support marking of incoming/outgoing packets with appropriate DSCP code, as congured by a service provider. A WiMAX femtocell should support mechanism to synchronize with external network to provide services that require strict air interface coordination. A WiMAX femtocell should provide at least 10 meters of coverage area in a residential set up without any exclusion zone around it. A WiMAX femtocell should support location identication procedures with core network. Location information can then be used for emergency services or location based services. Since WiMAX femtocell is deployed inside a building; a WiMAX femtocell needs to support at least 5-6 subscribers. With a range of roughly 10 meters, power output should be kept very low, no more than necessary with a 2.4 GHz WiFi product. A femtocell solution should t as per the WiMAX network architecture dened by the WiMAX forum. A femtocell solution should use a secured channel of communication, for both control plane and data plane, with ASN Gateways in the core network. The core network must authenticate and authorize a WiMAX femtocell before it starts offering services to MS/SS in its coverage area.
Form factor
Manageability
Quality of Service Network Synchronization
Air Interface Location Information User Capacity
Power Output
Performance
Security
TABLE. 2.3 Additional WiMAX requirements

Finally, we have seen that WiMAX femtocells, must deal with a set of required features also listed for the UMTS solutions. Table 2.3 summarizes these points.
Research Directions
We now consider the key areas and tools for conducting further femtocell research, with the goal of designing efcient femtocell architectures.
Interference Management
Due to the ad hoc topology of femtocell locations, interference suppression techniques alone will prove ineffective in femtocell networks. Successive interference cancellation, in which each user subtracts out the strongest neighboring interferers from their received signal, appears promising initially, but cancellation errors quickly degrade its usefulness. Consequently, an interference avoidance approach wherein users avoid rather than suppress mutual interference is more likely to work well in geography-dependent femtocell networks. In CDMA femtocell networks with universal frequency reuse, for example, interference avoidance through time hopping and directional antennas provides a 7 improvement in system capacity when macrocell and femtocell users share a common bandwidth.
Frequency and time hopping

In Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) networks, the interference avoidance offered through slow frequency hopping enables femtocell users and nearby transmitting macrocell users to avoid consistent mutual interference. Similarly, frequency-hopped OFDMA networks can use random sub-channel assignments in order to decrease the probability of persistent collision with neighboring femtocells.
Directional antennas
Directional antennas inside femtocells offer interference avoidance, with zero protocol over overhead, by restricting radio interference within an antenna sector. Providing a reasonable unit cost and easy end-user deployment are the key challenges confronting this approach.
Adaptive power control

Adaptive power control strategies vary the femtocell receive power target depending on its location. Commercial femtocells such as Sprints Airave femtocell tackle cross-tier interference using an automatic adaptation protocol that adjusts the femtocell transmit power.
MIMO femtocells
Multiple antennas at the transmitter and/or the receiver (multiple input multiple output, MIMO) exploit the spatial diversity of the wireless channel. Femtocells can perform temporal link adaptation through adaptive modulation and coding; additionally, MIMO spatial link adaptation will enable a femtocell to switch between providing high data rates and robust transmission. High data rates are obtainable by transmitting multiple spatial streams (spatial multiplexing) over high SINR links. Over low SINR links, MIMO provides robustness through open and closed loop diversity schemes such as space-time code and beamforming. Interesting areas for future research are: Link adaptive mode switching for femtocells between diversity and spatial multiplexing. Analyzing the effect of channel state information errors induced by co-channel interference on MIMO femtocell performance. The complexity limitations of MIMO femtocell receivers, which may be signicant vs. macrocell receivers due to cost considerations. Channel models for MIMO femtocells, since the diversity characteristics may be very different from macrocells. Having seen this, we conclude this chapter. Along it, we have presented theoretical arguments supported by practical simulations results and we have described the way in which femtocells could be connected to the existing operator networks. Also, we have outlined the most important technologies up to date for femtocells deployment. An especial section is devoted to both UMTS and WiMAX since these are the most important technologies suitable for femtocells. Finally, we list some elds in which important improvements can be done by means of research. We hope that with this content, the reader have had a good overview of the technical details related to femtocells.
DEF
Femtocell standards
By now, considerable progress has being made in the standardization process for femtocells. In this rapidly evolving application, standards continue to be rened and enhanced. Several important principles have been agree, which set the framework for more detailed specications. We can expect a series of minor alterations to the existing specications to optimize and improve the user experience over the coming years. The relevant standards are published by the 3G Partnership project (3GPP), a body constituted from the regional standards bodies such ETSI (in Europe) and ANSI (North America). Once the standard have been agreed and published, these are adopted by the regional bodies which have the regulatory cloud to mandate their adoption in each country. Mobile network operators are required to comply with these standard as part of the license conditions associated with the radio frequency spectrum allocation to them. Other bodies involved in the standard process are the Broadband Forum (formerly the DSL Forum), which created the TR-069 standard to remotely manage DSL modems. This has been adopted and reused without modication by the femtocell industry. Although related industry group is the Femto Forum, which lobbies for and promotes femtocell adoption. It consist of both vendors and operators with a remit to present a united front and common story. The organization has been recognised as an ofcial contributor to 3GPP, and thus can speed up the standardization process by agreeing a common industry position outside of the standards committees. In practice, standardization work continues in parallel across both organizations, often involving the same people.os
The Femtocell Market

Competing Technology For The Femtocell
For the gap generated by the 3G evolution, femtocell is not a winner all solution and as we will
see there are other competitors offering similar services or solutions. Some involve changing the mobile terminal having the function to work between two different protocols other are based on the capacity and coverage and other refer to lower the frequency at which the mobile services operates. The following is a more detailed information of the competitive technologies that femtocell must face.
Dual mode Wi-Fi phones

These are already commercially available and offered in the United Kingdom by BT (BT Fusion) and in France by France Telecom/Orange (Unique). The system requires customers to use a special dual-mode GSM/WiFi phone which restricts the choice of phones signicantly. The WiFi mode can be used both at home and at any BT hotspot when out and about. Calls can be handed over between the hotspot and the macro-cellular network. BT Fusion tariff allows four times the number of minutes when used with a hotspot. For example, 100 minutes on GSM = 400 minutes on the home hotspot. Recent reports suggest that take-up of the service has been relatively limited (around 40,000 users) and the number of users is at. However this may change with a wider range of handsets becoming available. France Telecom/Orange have had a much wider take-up of their similar dual-mode WiFi offering. This may be partly due to the heavy penetration of WiFi/DSL modems already sold, and the much larger geographic coverage (and thus potential poor coverage areas) of the country. Known commercially live services include: BT Fusion, UK T-Mobile, US Orange Unik, France and other countries Telecom Italia Telia Denmark Saunalahti, Finland
The dual-mode WiFi architecture is standardised and known as UMA. It is one of the proposed architectures for 3G femtocells, and has been used by several vendors in successful trials, reusing the experience gained.
Improved Microcellular Coverage and Capacity

If the service provided by the operator is adequate to meet customers needs, then they may not feel it necessary to install their own complex equipment and risk faults and errors. With many users happy to use only voice and text, there is considerable capacity within the existing mobile networks except in particularly dense tower blocks or remote rural areas. The real benet to the user comes where mobile data is used, and where the lower costs of providing this via the mobile network can be passed back to the end user. 3G technology has a roadmap with continuous improvements, including HSPA+ that could be deployed as a software upgrade to existing 3G networks. However, new handsets would be required to take full advantage of the improvements.
3G at lower frequencies such as 850Mhz.

Part of the reason that 3G does not operate well indoors is that the global frequency allocated is around 2100MHz. Some countries, notably Australia, have deployed 3G systems at 850MHz (which is close to the 900MHz 2G GSM frequency commonly used). As a result, much longer distances can be reached in rural areas (claimed broadband service of 2Mbit/s at a distance of 120km using an ourdoor antenna), whilst inbuilding penetration is much improved in urban areas.
LTE (Long Term Evolution)

This is yet another radio interface, based on OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing), which is also used by WiMax. Trial equipment is already demonstrating data rates in excess of 100Mbit/s, and standardization is proceeding quickly. The rst commercial launches are expected in 2-3 years.
Out Of The Market

It may be obvious that femtocells are going to be installed in the so called Oasis, this places where one can nd WiFi spots (i.e. coffees, fast food restaurants, libraries, airports). But since the femtocells are a one-operator devices this may not apply. An Oasis may need to have a several number of femtocells from different operator networks in order to offer the users the diversity of the service. There is no plan to create a multi-operator device supporting several networks where users from different networks could roam. This is not the business case for femtocell to be sold to coffee shops.
Femtocell Irrelevant
With the cost of mobile devices driving down up to prices under $30, countries like India,
China and Indonesia are attracting between them 20 million of new subscribers per month. Still none of this countries has a 3G network but instead are using 2G GSM technology. This drives to some problems when thinking to apply 3G femtocells, basically focused on the few broadband DSL subscribers and no available 3G licences yet. The coverage issue then is non sense since there is no broadband available in the areas where there is no cellular coverage. Same problem appear when talking about data delivery, there is also a low percentage of personal computers. This countries are not very developed when talking about the domestic computer market penetration. The vision of the mobile users in this countries may not link between the cellular network and the personal computer usage, this two devices may still be seen as two separate entities and a vision of them working together is not clear. The evolution of internet access in home and other offers by telecommunication industry may be on the road to arrive. The usage of a device that will deal with problems that have not yet been appreciated by the
customer is indeed of no need. There is a different appreciation of a mobile device between developed and developing countries. For the developing countries this is technology that is being implemented and that is new. Users are not experienced and therefore do not know what to expect as for a good or bad services, the actual service is the parameter of quality. If it is bad or if it is good there is no difference as long as it works.
This countries have not experienced the full service of the 3G evolution and are maybe a little bit behind of this. So perhaps the usage of the 3G evolution is still to come in future delivering more benets with new technologies or the come of LTE. This solution is more for countries where the mobile industry is more mature, where connection to broadband is everywhere. Some times in this developed countries we may nd that the use of more than one computer per home.
Overview
There are some basic points one must have in mind when thinking about the femtocell business case. First the femtocells are designed for a very specic target and that is to solve the indoor coverage for users who already have a broadband subscription. Very important feature when trying to compare it to another technology or service. Femtocells will work because it relays on the internet structure which comes to be much cheaper than relaying on the mobile structure. The device is with no means trying to capture new subscribers to sign in for a broadband connection, but to improve coverage and battery life of the devices actively connected, and release some of the trafc generated in the house. The femtocell device that will work inside the house is not for a public purpose, only the members of the house which may need to be from the same service provider, will benet from the coverage. Neighbors will not benet from the coverage unless they are authorized by the owner of the device. An aggregate value for bonding all the users and services into a same operator, is the reduced fee with some economic plan that the operator offers in return when using its femtocell device.
Femtocell Vendors
There are several categories of femtocell manufactures.
Independent femtocell specialist companies.

These companies have their own agreement with high volume manufacturing contractors. Ubiquist ip.access Airvana Radioframe There are been strategic investments in these companies from Google and Cisco, motivating them to keep them independent from the traditional network equipment vendors.
Traditional Network Equipment Manufacturers

These companies already have their own high volume production plants. Such companies for example Alcatel-Lucent already make some volumes on broadband modems and other consumer items. Another example is Huawei and ZTE they also produce both handset and network infrastructure. Alcatel-Lucent Hauwei ZTE Netgear Thompson Motorola
It is very likely that femtocells will be incorporated into set top boxes and broadband modems, so that the existing vendors of those products will be large volumes producers of femtocell products in the medium to long term. In the short term, we may see separate products developed and manufactured, either by the femtocell vendors themselves or under contract. We are standing at the very start the road map of femtocell further new product versions may be launched in volume to meet market needs.
GHI
Equipment Overview
by
Sprint is one of the operators that sells the femtocell solution, the package contains: AIRAVE base station CAT5 Ethernet Cable Power Supply and Power Cord
Observations
1.- There is no need of specic knowledge or skills rather than a basic plug and play operation. The basic requirement to connect the Airave, is to have a DSL connection and an available ethernet connection to the router. Then Femtocell must be placed near a window and in a central location, it is better if it is placed in an elevated location. Plug the Femtocell to the router via the ethernet cable and then plug it to the power supply. 2.- To conrm a successful installation the leds must be checked. Power, System, WAN and GPS led must be steady blue. If the GPS led is blinking that means that the internal GPS antenna has not detected any signal and then the external GPS antenna should be installed.
by 3.- Regarding the activation, the femtocell should be operating automatically, when buying it some information will be required in order to be register. (Wireless Phone Number or Account Number, Account Password and the MAC ID of the specic base station). 4.- The GPS antenna (internal o external) is used to help the basestation nd a GPS satellite and get current location. This is very useful for the E911 (Enhanced 9 1 1)services. This is a service that automatically associates a physical address with the calling telephone number and then routes the call to the most proximate Public Safety Answering Point for that specic location. 5.- Without a GPS signal the basestation will not work and the calls will be redirected to the nearest cell tower. It may be obvious to place the external GPS antenna in an outdoor place but according to the user manual that shouldnt be done.
Customer Comments
The Follwing are user comments about the Airave and its use. User Comments extracted from Treonauts.com http://blog.treonauts.com/2008/07/sprint-airave-n.html I got an Airave last week from Sprint. Without it, I usually get 1-0 bars, or I roam to a Canadian tower across the Straight of Juan de Fuca. Pretty bad in my house. The Airave works, but I have experienced 3 problems so far. 1. It really only works effectively when I locate it on the second oor. It didn't work well on the rst oor. If I put it in the front of the house on the rst oor, I got a poor signal in the back of the house and little to none in the back yard. 2. When I leave the house in my car, I noticed on two occassions I dropped the connection before it will pick up a local tower. The dropped connection is only for a moment, but.... 3. This morning I had the same problem without the Airave -- my Treo 650 did not pick up an incoming call, even with 2-3 bars from the Airave connection. I got the voice mail message several minutes after the call. So far, Hmmmmn? I denitely get a nice 2-4 bars pretty much every where on my standard city lot, even in the basement. I kept an excellent and reportedly crystal clear connection (as good or better than my very expensive Panasonic cordless landline business phone) over a 30 minute call as I moved all about my house and yard. I know Verizon has adequate service for my location, but is it worth an extra $40-$50 for voice, data and text, and the frustration of waiting for Verizon to come out with the newest Treo??? Mark Baumann | Aug 6, 2008 8:08:10 PM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Thank you so much for giving me so much information about the AIRAVE. I just got it and set it up this evening and we immediately went from 0 - 2 bars to 5 steady bars in the house!! My husband is going to be so thrilled! In a perfect world, we should not be responsible for boosting Sprint's signal for which we already pay a healthy amount; but in reality, it's worth the c-note and the $20/month to not have the frustration of dropped calls and not having to venture out of the house into the elements to have a simple conversation. Sprint was the only provider which could get us a signal in the house which is why we have them and now I'm real happy we made that choice many moons ago. by Alison May | Aug 27, 2008 2:10:43 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I got AIRAVE couple of weeks ago, and I am having a problem that I cannot explain. I have Vonage VOIP service for home phone. After installing AIRAVE, during an incoming call I cannot hear the other person but they can hear me. This happens with my Vonage phone and Sprint phones (Centro and 3 Katanas). If I make a call on either Vonage or Sprint phones everything works. by Hemant Shah | Sep 2, 2008 6:41:08 PM
JKL
Conclusions
After the completion of this work, we would like to state our conclusions. 1. Femtocells represent many and very important benets for the operators: rst of all, femtocells will provide excellent coverage in place where it is need the most: indoors. In addition, and from the technical point of view, we have remarked that the network capacity is also busted. And nally, the average revenue per user (ARPU) is also incremented which is very important from the economical point of view. 2. For the users, perhaps the most important, the service experience will be improved. Femtocells is an approach guarantying that very high rates can be delivered such that any kind of multimedia services can be offered with the corresponding QoS. 3. We have observed that the biggest challenge for this technology is to integrate the femtocells devices to the existing network transparently and in a secure fashion. Many proposals have been done and nowadays the nal solution has not been chosen. 4. It is also clear that the complete will not be easy. There are still many issues which have to be addressed by the standardization entities and regulatory bodies. Also technical challenges have appeared and intense research effort is being doing to overcome these obstacles and successfully integrate the femtocells into the existing high speed wireless networks. 5. Another think that has been clearly established here is that the business case for femtocells has a big future in the countries in which the telecom/internet/broadband infrastructure is quite developed: available almost everywhere. 6. Our personal experience has been quite good. We have had the opportunity to research and nd information related to new and growing technology close to our study eld. One interesting topic we have recognized is that in the evolution of new technology not only the technical facts count but also the economical and business drivers. In fact the context, we mean the specic country or region also inuences the strategic decisions of the big vendors and operators. The last has a big impact in the technology development itself. 7. Finally, femtocell approach must be understood as a solution for people having a solid broadband connection available and high requirements in terms of multimedia services. It is clear also, that femtocells are being designed for indoors mainly and with the goal to cooperate and interact with the wireless networks such that the user experience and the operator revenue can be increased.
References
a/A
[1] V. Chandrasekhar, J. Andrews, Femtocell Networks: A Survey, IEEE COMMUNICATIONS MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 2008 [2] Mohamed-Slim Alouini, Andrea J. Goldsmith, Area Spectral Efciency of Cellular Mobile Radio Systems, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 48, NO. 4, JULY 1999 [3] H. Claussen, Performance of Macro-and Co-channel Femtocells in a Hierarchical Cell Structure, 18th ANNUAL IEEE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON PERSONAL, INDOOR AND MOBILE RADIO COMMUNICATIONS (PIMRC07) [4] Shu-ping Yeh et al, WiMAX Femtocells: A Perspective on Network Architecture, Capacity, and Coverage IEEE COMMUNICATIONS MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 2008 [5] Kineto Wireless, Inc. The 3GPP Standard for Femtocell-to-Core Network Connectivity A KINETO WHITE PAPER, AUGUST 2007 [6] Silventoinen et al, Analysis of a new channel access method for home base station, IEEE ICPWC 96 [7] Silventoinen et al, Total frequency hopping for home base station, IEEE ICPWC 96 [8] Femtocell Primer: Quickly get up speed on this new mobile phone tecnology, David Chamber [9] ThinkFemtocell http://www.thinkfemtocell.com/ [10] FemtoForum http://www.femtoforum.org/ [11] New York Times Articles How to Amplify Those Fading Bars http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/technology/personaltech/01basics.html? _r=1&scp=2&sq=femtocell&st=cse [12] Airvana Airvana Femtocell FAQ http://www.airvana.com/products/products_559.htm [13] BBC Home cells signal mobile change
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6916125.stm [14] PC World Google Invests in Cellular Tech Jul 21, 2007 7:00 pm http://www.pcworld.com/article/134895/google_invests_in_cellular_tech.html [15] Femtocells Draw Interest as Cell Service Extenders Oct 15, 2007 5:00 pm http://www.pcworld.com/article/138445/femtocells_draw_interest_as_cell_service_extenders.html [16] Forum Says Femtocells to Boost Cellular Capacity Ten-fold Dec 2, 2008 10:20 am http://www.pcworld.com/article/154753/ forum_says_femtocells_to_boost_cellular_capacity_tenfold.html [17] The 25 Most Innovative Products of the Year 2007 http://www.pcworld.com/article/140663-5/the_25_most_innovative_products_of_the_year.html [18] Reuters UK http://uk.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=59291&videoChannel=6 [19] Sprint www.sprint.com Airave User Manual [20] EE Times Carriers push at femtocell opportunity http://www.eetimes.eu/206800077 [21] ElectronicsWeekly.com Ubiquisys and MIT work out business model for femtocells http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2008/12/16/45146/ubiquisys-and-mit-work-out-businessmodel-for-femtocells.htm [22] ABI Reseach Ubiquisys Tops New Femtocell Vendor Matrix Ranking http://www.abiresearch.com/abiprdisplay.jsp?pressid=871 [23] DeadZone.com Femtocell Do Have Limitations http://www.deadzones.com/2008/09/femtocells-do-have-limitations.html [24] ConnectedHome2go.com Femtocell in a Photoframe http://connectedhome2go.com/2008/09/19/femtocell-in-a-photo-frame/

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Femtocell

A technical report presented to Joseph Paradells, ph,D

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

3. The Femtocell Standards

4. Equipment Overview 4.1 Customer Comments 5. Conclusions 6. References

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

The Business Case

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Better Signal Churn Rate Ofoading Trafc Silent Mode Security

Easy Installation Battery Life

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Five Bars on your cellular-phone.

Keeping The Clients

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Spatial Spectral Efciency

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

C = Blog (1+SINR) EQ. 21

Femtocell Performance and Feasibility

Co-channel Femtocell Impact and Additional Requirements

Wrapping cell to avoid edge effects and obtain reliable results.

Outdoor path loss

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

FIG. 2.6 Simulated scenario in [3]

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Co-channel Requirements For Femtocells

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Additional feasibility issues.

Security ser vices authentication, privacy

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

FIG. 2.11 Femtocell Device-to-Core Network Connectivity Approaches.

FIG. 2.12 Network Interface, NBAP and OAM support

RAN-GW based UMA

TABLE. 2.2 Comparison of Device-to-Core Network Connectivity Approaches

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Femtocells Supporting Technologies

The Femtocell Choice: UMTS or WiMax

FIG. 2.14 Typical UMTS femtocell device solution.

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Quality of Service Network Synchronization

Air Interface Location Information User Capacity

TABLE. 2.3 Additional WiMAX requirements

Frequency and time hopping

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Adaptive power control

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

The Femtocell Market

Dual mode Wi-Fi phones

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Improved Microcellular Coverage and Capacity

3G at lower frequencies such as 850Mhz.

LTE (Long Term Evolution)

Femtocells Technology {AL,DGG } @ UPC, Jan, 2009

Out Of The Market