AdvancedTCA’s Big Femtocell Opportunity

By Manish Singh, Continuous Computing

A femtocell is a small wireless basestation. It resides inside a consumer’s home to provide greater indoor coverage while offloading wireless traffic from the mobile core network.

What is the opportunity here for AdvancedTCA? The key area is the implementation of femtocell gateways. Telcos want to integrate femtocells into their networks without changing their existing 3G core infrastructures. Such integration requires a Femto Gateway (FGW), an edge element with two primary functions:

• Aggregate traffic from hundreds of thousands of femtocells

• Deliver that traffic over standard 3GPP to circuit-switched and packet-switched core networks, thereby ensuring that no changes are required in the 3G core

High availability is a key requirement as an outage could seriously disrupt traffic for many wireless users. FGWs also need to handle high data rates and offer Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) capabilities to support data offload and lawful intercept.

Because it is carrier-grade, highly reliable, and scalable, AdvancedTCA is a compelling platform of choice for FGWs. As network operators start their femtocell trials, they can deploy small footprint AdvancedTCA-based FGWs, which can then be scaled easily when more capacity and features are needed. This approach gives operators a low-cost entry solution that can still do the job as the wireless network expands. The platform is also compatible with other AdvancedTCA-based equipment that is now becoming the base of many wireless systems and other telco applications.   

Furthermore, with 10G backplane support and 10G network interfaces, AdvancedTCA provides adequate traffic handling capacity. The current generation of 3G femtocells is expected to support 4 to 6 simultaneous voice calls and 14.4Mbps of HSDPA data traffic. AdvancedTCA also offers network equipment providers a wide range of input/output choices to support both legacy and emerging network interfaces. For example, FGWs will need to support legacy ATM and perhaps T1/E1 interfaces as well. On the other hand, FGWs will also require IP connections for today’s emerging networks.

An example suitable AdvancedTCA configuration is Continuous Computing’s FlexTCA Wireless platform, which is uniquely architected for FGWs. FlexTCA employs Intel’s Xeon dual-Nehalem XE60 or dual-Harpertown XE50 compute blades with pre-integrated Trillium protocol signaling stacks and AMC slots for I/O interfaces. FlexTCA also employs the FM40 10GbE switch and PP50 10GbE packet processing engine for efficient load balancing. Leveraging GoAhead SAF-compliant middleware and the inherent high availability features of Trillium software, all IPsec tunnels are efficiently terminated at the PP50 and all the fast path GTP tunnel handling is done there. Last but not least, the FlexTCA solution supports additional DPI functionality for applications such as Internet Offload and Lawful Intercept.

In summary, femto gateways (FGWs) represent a great opportunity for AdvancedTCA. With benefits ranging from high availability and high data rates to flexibility, scalability, and a multitude of I/O options, AdvancedTCA is an ideal platform for participating in the femtocell market’s projected rapid growth.

Manish Singh is at Continuous Computing. You can reach him at manish.singh@ccpu.com.