Localization of Data and Control Plane Traffic in Enterprise Femtocell Networks

Key incentives for mobile operators to offer femtocell services are the possibilities to cost-efficiently enhance indoor coverage and to offload traffic from the macro-cellular network. While femtocells were originally conceived for standalone deployments in user homes, there is an increasing interest in exploiting their advantages also in an enterprise context. However, with the current architecture as specified by 3GPP, such deployments face technical and economical challenges. This paper proposes a solution for localizing data and control plane traffic inside "Enterprise Femtocell Networks", which significantly offloads both the mobile core network and the backhaul to the core network.