Approach

BeFEMTO’s vision of broadband evolved femtocells comprises four major themes.

It envisages a smooth convergence between broadband fixed and wireless services by focusing on LTE-A based stand-alone femtocell through development of innovative concepts and algorithms required to guarantee a successful deployment of femto solutions in the near future. In this context, advanced RF, interference and radio resource management procedures and co-existence with macrocells will be the key-enablers exhibiting great advances towards higher spectral efficiencies and reduced radiation exposure.

With networked femtocells BeFEMTO will investigate on advanced cooperation between femtocells installed in buildings such as hospitals, offices or shopping malls. This approach offers new service provisioning for home, office and enterprise environments, and, consequently, new market and business opportunities for service providers. This requires novel concepts and algorithms with special focus on resource and interference management, network synchronization, and architectural design facilitating a tight integration into macro and other infrastructure networks. Fixed outdoor relay femtocell with self-organising capabilities will relax signalling delay and loading on wireless links between relay and macrocell base station. Mobile or moving femto nodes, outdoor femtocells, are also novel and they are to be installed in passenger vehicles such as buses and trains providing broadband communications to people on the move such as public transports. Consequently, we have to cope with a wireless backhaul link as opposed to the wireline link used for fixed or indoor stand-alone femto nodes.