LTE femto network architecture

LTE Femtocells are low-power cellular base stations that use licensed spectrum and are typically deployed in residential, enterprise, metropolitan hotspot or rural settings. They provide an excellent user experience through enhanced coverage, performance, throughput and services based on location.
 
Femtocells can also offload traffic from the macrocell network and enable new applications such as location based services.
 
This white paper provides an operator friendly guide to the LTE femtocell architecture options outlined in the 3GPP standard. It concludes that operators’ choices will be driven by their existing infrastructure, how quickly they want to roll out femtocells and how widely they plan to deploy them.
 
The report finds that the three femtocell architecture options outlined in the LTE standard comprehensively support a wide variety of operator deployment scenarios. It details key factors that operators need to consider in order to make the most prudent architecture choice, based on their specific business and technology circumstances.