Femtocell
End-to-end Femtocell Ecosystem Testing
Femtocells are low-power wireless access points that operate in licensed spectrum to connect standard mobile devices to a mobile operator's network using residential DSL or cable broadband connections. Femtocells offer many potential benefits to both consumers and operators, including increased performance, better coverage, and traffic offload from congested macro cells.
Small cell – or femtocell – deployments have great market promise, but bring a number of important challenges that must be overcome before products and services can become fully viable. Major challenges include scalability, security, mobility, ease of deployment, and interoperability. These areas must be fully validated to prevent product and service delays, which can ultimately impact small-cell market growth.
- 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 tested to ensure a positive user experience.
- To be economically viable, residential femtocells must have self-organizing network (SON) capability to avoid site-specific radio planning and optimization. The functionality and operation of the home eNodeB (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 points must be fully compatible with the operators HeNB gateway.
Ixia's femtocell test solution is the industry's most innovative, powerful, and comprehensive. It gives equipment manufacturers and operators the ability to anticipate all deployment challenges by emulating any node in the femtocell ecosystem, including user equipment, HeNBs, HeNB gateways (HeNB GW), and HeNB management systems.
Ixia's market-leading, real-world subscriber modeling and sophisticated quality of experience (QoE) measurements provide the ultimate use-case scenarios that prove femtocell designs are ready to handle high-quality, next-generation mobile data services (such as live conversational video).
Ixia's test solution emulates the following devices:
- User equipment (UE)
- HeNB
- HeNB GW
- HeNB Management System
- Serving gateway (S-GW)
- Mobility management entity (MME)
Ixia's test solution supports the following use cases and test configurations:
- Femtocell ecosystem end-to-end system validation (including HeNB, HeNB GW, MME, and S-Gateway)
- HeNB isolation
- HeNB GW isolation
- HeNB management system isolation
End-to-end Femtocell testing
HeNB isolation
HeNB Gateway isolation
Macro-to-Femto handover
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