Local mobility and service access for enterprise femtocell networks

Femtocells were originally designed for standalone home deployment. Yet, there is a growing interest in exploiting their advantages also in many cell deployments for enterprises and public spaces. Such Enterprise Femtocell Networks EFNs differ not only in scale but also in user traffic patterns and service requirements. A significant share of user traffic in EFNs is local, that is, between mobile devices attached to the same EFN. In the current 3rd Generation Partnership Project 3GPP architecture, this traffic is nevertheless sent to the mobile core network and back, causing unnecessary load on the core and backhaul network infrastructures. Local Internet Protocol IP Access LIPA and Selective IP Traffic Offload play important roles in EFNs, but the current 3GPP architecture supports them neither with full mobility within and to/from EFN nor with the possibility to re-establish LIPA sessions from the macro network with a single, consistent mechanism.