Femtocell and Picocell
With the explosive growth of demand for cellular voice
and data services anywhere and anytime, macro networks are becoming
overloaded and consumers are experiencing poor service inside buildings.
Picocells and femtocells address this problem by providing voice and data
coverage over a small area. Picocells generally act as cellular nodes for
commercial premises up to 30,000 square feet, while femtocells are targeted
at smaller business and residential premises. These products allow consumers
to use their existing 3G mobile phone to get local service over the
broadband connection, without the need to purchase a WiFi-specific handset.
Service providers are now deploying picocells and femtocells to improve
business and residential customer satisfaction while offloading their macro
networks from traffic.
For communications equipment manufacturers the
challenge is to bring these new radio access gateway products to market as
quickly as possible in the face of increasing competition. The challenges
include:
- Far-reaching design decisions to meet the continuous
evolution of the 3G standards
- Rapid development processes
- Complex network and systems integration
- Mission-critical interoperability testing
Aricent co-created the world’s first commercially
successful femtocell solution, and we leverage that experience to help
customers create and deliver highly-differentiated new products. Aricent’s
picocell and femtocell products and services reduce risks, reduce time to
market, and ensure that these products meet the very latest communications
standards to deliver the performance end users expect.
Aricent brings outstanding global product design,
development, testing and implementation services to the challenge of
picocell and femtocell product development. Our advantages include:
- Mature solutions: Aricent has an extensive
portfolio of software products that are complete, extensively
field-tested, and proven to interoperate with other communications
products.
- Alliances:
Aricent is tightly aligned with other leaders in femtocell product
development to streamline the end-to-end development process, including
hardware platform, middleware software and operating system vendors. We
leverage our history of successful product developments with these
partners to accelerate new femtocell or picocell developments.
- In-depth expertise and proven experience:
We have immense knowledge in the core wireless domain and years of
proven experience creating mobility solutions, including the software in
picocell and femtocell nodes.
- Reduced time-to-revenue: We offer widely
deployed and interoperability-tested “off-the-shelf” software products
for 3G system development.
- 3G expertise: Aricent is a member of all
the major standards bodies such as the 3GPP Forum, the UMTS Forum, ETSI,
IETF and the SIP Forum. We constantly track the rapid evolution of
mobile technologies.
- Cellular technology know-how: We are
experts at managing cellular-specific issues such as handover, roaming,
routing, and security in mobile environments.
-
Interoperability: We understand the complex communication
requirements between the gateway, the base station and the servers
providing authentication, authorization and accounting, and we make sure
that everything is seamless for the mobile end user.
- Support and maintenance: Aricent can
support and maintain picocell or femtocell systems once they are
deployed.
Aricent’s picocell and femtocell products deliver
outstanding functionality and ease of use to speed market entry for OEMs and
ODMs. Aricent products:
- Support CS as well as PS domains besides providing
Node B, DRNC, and SRNC functionalities
- Support ATM and IP transport
- Support HSUPA and HSDPA for fast packet scheduling
and quick retransmission to achieve high data rates in the uplink and
the downlink paths
- Include MAC-e and Mac-hs offerings and a C source
code implementation which are easily portable on multiple real-time or
customized light-weight operating systems and hardware platforms, such
as DSP and network processors
- Provide short and fixed packet Transmission Time
Interval (TTI) of 2ms at the physical layer
- Support transfer of the Transport Block Sets (TBS)
across the Iub interface in the uplink and the downlink transport
channels, between Node B and the CRNC, and between Node B and the SRNC
within each TTI of 10ms/20ms/40ms/80ms
- Provide high throughput by efficient memory
management, optimized data structures, and efficient search algorithms
- Support IuFlex, which allows the RAN Nodes to
connect to several CN Nodes
- Provide a uniform management interface for
initialization, provisioning, and timer management
- Support multiple debug trace levels, error levels,
and statistics reporting required for the operation, administration, and
maintenance of the protocol stacks
Aricent’s IMS test lab offers a unique opportunity for
telecommunications manufacturers to perform end-to-end testing on their
equipment under a converged architecture. We can test new femtocells or
picocells across heterogeneous access networks, with FMC services, and in
other common usage scenarios. Tests cover the entire spectrum of
conformance, performance and interoperability testing.
For service providers deploying picocells or
femtocells, the lab enables anticipatory performance testing for vendor
nodes as well as end-to-end testing from the entire network perspective.
This complete environment allows service providers to address management,
spectrum re-use, backhaul and performance issues.