Though little, femtocells present big management challenges

Data offload looks to be a big trend this year, as operators deploy a number of technologies – including femtocells – to relieve congestion on their core mobile data networks caused by smart phones, tablets and other devices.

While many femtocell discussions focus on network architecture, the management of small-cell networks will likely prove challenging as well. In particular, mobile operators must ensure that the set up of a new device and service is seamless and trouble free as possible. That’s been somewhat daunting, however, as femtocells involve many new technologies for self-configuring and connecting to core networks, as well as integrating security, authorization, authentication and other services.

“The idea of a femto cell being a self organizing network [SON] has to become a reality if operators are to deploy the technology en masse,” said Joe Zeto, market development manager for Ixia, which today announced its IxCatapult solution for testing the
entire femtocell ecosystem, including access points and gateways. The solution does for femtos what Ixia has been doing for years for routers, switches, mobile backhaul, 3G and 4G networks—providing a platform for testing and measuring the user experience on the network.

According to Zeto, there are six key femtocell: scalability, security, ease of use, interoperability, mobility and quality of experience.

Because femto access points will be deployed to millions of homes supporting millions of subscribers and smart devices, scalability will be one of the top priorities, said Zeto, noting also that new components and functionality will constantly be introduced. “That meansease of deployment will have to be a constant focus as there will be so many new components to manage,” said Zeto. “When configuring femto cells, you want to minimize interference among cells, but you obviously can’t afford engineering crews, electric, cabling, and radio resource planning for something so small as this device. This is especially true as operators get into offering consumers more choices with different access points and different price points.”

To help address these challenges, Zeto says operators should seek the ability to emulate on the access side the different devices and behaviors possible on smart devices such as uploading music, downloading videos, and surfing the web. Simultaneously, they must monitor what’s happening on the IP network side to see the data servers and to make measurements of throughput, latency, jitter, video and voice quality, and overall quality realized for an overall understanding of quality of experience (QoE) on the network.

“Operators really want to differentiate with better service quality, so they have to pay attention to the aforementioned big-six challenges if they are to have the best-performing network and satisfied customers,” said Zeto.