June 20, 2013

A test event, attended by 16 companies, has demonstrated the effectiveness of the 3GPP LTE standards in supporting interoperability between small cells and Evolved Packet Core (EPC) equipment.

The Small Cell Forum has issued a press statement to announce the completion of its first Plugfest, focused on 3GPP Release 9 compliant FDD LTE small cells, organised by the ETSI Centre for Testing and Interoperability and hosted by the SINTESIO test lab in Slovenia.

The Press Statement continues;

"The 3GPP LTE Release 9 standards were frozen in December 2009 and are widely used in LTE macro networks. Small cells compliant to the standards allow mobile operators to simplify deployment and enable better coverage and capacity for their LTE networks.

Successful interoperability tests, monitored by test tools, were conducted between small cells and EPCs, security gateways, macro eNodeB and as an option HeNB gateways to verify the S1 interface implementations. In a multi-vendor HetNet environment mobility scenarios such as hand-out with the macro network using S1 and X2 interface were tested. VoLTE (IMS) calls were also tested. The Plugfest routinely repeated tests of IPsec/IKEv2 security protocols which allow small cell to communicate over the public Internet to operators' core networks in a highly secure manner.

The Forum has conducted three previous Plugfests on topics including device interoperability, management and 3GPP standards.

The full press release is on-line at; www.smallcellforum.org

Some Plugfest highlights:

Download the Plugfest Report...Click here

• All vendors succeeded the mandatory S1 tests
• 2 HeNB vendors succeeded to make a VoLTE call on the dedicated bearer using Iskratel IMS
• 3 HeNB vendors succeeded S1 small cell to macro handout with Telecom Slovenia eNB
  •  inter: band 1 small cell to band 3 macro
  •  intra: band 3 small cell to band 3 macro, same frequency
  •  inter: band 3 small cell to band 3 macro, different frequency
• 2 HeNB vendor succeeded S1 small cell to small cell handover with Telecom Slovenia EPC
  •  intra: band 1 small cell and band 1 small cell, same frequency
  •  inter: band 1 small cell and band 3 small cell, different frequency
• 1 vendor succeeded X2 small cell to macro handout with Telecom Slovenia eNB

About the Small Cell Forum

The Small Cell Forum (www.etsi.org) supports the wide-scale adoption of small cells. Small cells are low-power wireless access points that operate in licensed spectrum, are operator-managed and feature edge-based intelligence. They provide improved cellular coverage, capacity and applications for homes and enterprises as well as metropolitan and rural public spaces. They include technologies variously described as femtocells, picocells, microcells and metrocells. The Forum has in excess of 150 members including 68 operators representing more than 3 billion mobile subscribers – 46 per cent of the global total – as well as telecoms hardware and software vendors, content providers and innovative start-ups.

About ETSI

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged, broadcast and internet technologies and is officially recognized by the European Union as a European Standards Organization. As a complement to its core standards-making task, ETSI specializes in running interoperability test events for a wide range of telecommunication, Internet, broadcasting and multimedia converging standards. ETSI is a not-for-profit organization with more than 700 ETSI member organizations drawn from 62 countries across 5 continents.

ETSI is a Founding Partner of 3GPP

For more information, please visit: www.etsi.org

Contact for this story:
Ed Howson
Ed@smallcellforum.org
+44 (0)20 7089 8895