The continual demand for more and more data over wireless networks is fueling HSPA+ and LTE technology roll-outs. With this growth comes an increase in femtocell use in order to provide access in places that are not suited for traditional wireless deployments and to offload congested macro cells. ABI Research forecasts that the total femtocell market will exceed 45 million globally within five years. This increase of the technology’s acceptance will be fueled by the availability of femtocell services as deployments migrate to the mass market. Several Tier 1 European mobile operators including Vodafone in the
Major players like Vodafone and T-Mobile have announced upcoming B2B offerings, illustrating the significant applicability of the technology to the enterprise market. Further evidence of growth lies in the total number of deployment commitments. According to Informa Telecoms and Media's 2010 Femtocell Market Status Report compiled for the Femto Forum, as of December 2010 there were 18 commercial services and a total of 30 deployment commitments by year’s end. Deployments have almost tripled in the last 12 months.
Femtocells are low-power wireless access points for connecting standard mobile devices to a mobile operator's network. They work using residential DSL or cable broadband connections and have the potential to change the mobile broadband industry's approach to cell design and deployment. Femtocells operate in licensed spectrum and offer many potential benefits to both consumers and operators, including increased upload/download performance, better coverage (5 bars), and traffic offload from congested macro cells.
Like most emerging technologies gaining wide acceptance, femtocells must overcome a number of important challenges before products and services are fully viable. Major challenges include scalability, security, mobility, ease of deployment and interoperability. Full validation of these areas prevents product and service delays that might ultimately impact small cell market growth. Assessing all network aspects and femtocell devices both individually and as part of an end-to-end system gives equipment manufacturers and operators the ability to test all deployment challenges.
All nodes in the femtocell ecosystem, including user equipment, home eNodeBs (HeNBs), HeNB gateways (HeNB GW), and HeNB management systems must be thoroughly tested to ensure the highest service quality.
For LTE based femtocells validation can be broken down into scalability, security, mobility, ease of deployment, and interoperability:
- Home eNodeB gateway scalability must be fully validated on multiple dimensions, including raw throughput, connections per second, and transaction per second with security enabled.
- Vulnerability to security attacks must be assessed and performance of IPSec encryption and functionality of ciphering technologies must be evaluated.
- Operators must validate mobility between femtocells and macro cells, and both positive and negative handover conditions must be fully feted to ensure a positive user experience.
- To be viable economically residential femtocells must have self-organizing network (SON) capability to avoid site specific radio planning and optimization. The functionality and operation of the HeNB and HeNB management system to the TR-069 standard is critical.
- Operators must offer consumers a variety of access point to select from and each access point must be fully compatible with the operators HeNB gateway.
According the Yankee Group, 65 percent of carriers expect to plan at least some of their LTE coverage using femtocells “from the bottom up” starting late 2012 and Informa expects the femtocell market to experience significant growth, reaching just under 49 million Femtocell Access Points (FAP) in the market by 2014 with 114 million mobile users accessing mobile networks through femtocells. This represents a significant investment in what looks to become a huge installed base of an emerging technology with much market promise.
