The AirWalk Communications EdgePoint femtocell uses the Lime Microsystems Ltd. LMS-6002 configurable broadband transceiver IC. This fully integrated multi-band, multi-standard single-chip RF transceiver is designed to meet 3GPP, 3GPP2 (CDMA2000), and WiMAX applications (Fig. 4a and Fig. 4b). It allows developers to rapidly and simply replace several individual transceiver chips in a small basestation for space, cost, and flexibility as well as faster time-to-market capabilities.

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AirWalk recently collaborated with Mindspeed Technologies and Arcinet to develop an LTE picocell. Airwalk will begin offering an LTE product line starting with picocells next year, followed by femtocells. A picocell is like a femtocell. But while femtocells focus on consumer applications, picocells target the enterprise market.

According to ABI Research, picocells deliver a more cost-efficient solution for LTE than femtocells for companies with 20 to 100 employees. In fact, ABI predicts that picocell growth, while not very large in terms of volume, will reach 366,000 units deployed by 2013 for a 38% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) since 2008. 

Software Reigns Supreme

Software plays a critical role in femtocell technology. In developing its femtocell platform, TI worked with software partners MimoOn and Continuous Computing for software reference designs that provide customers with software for layers 1, 2, and 3 wireless protocol processing.

At this year’s Mobile World Congress, TI announced the availability of a PHY reference design for a new platform that serves up to 32 users. The platform is based on TI’s SoC solution developed in collaboration with software providers Azcom Technology and Nash Technologies. The 3GPP voice and data PHY reference stack for universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) femtocell products is designed for 3GPP Releases 6 and 7.

Continuous Computing has announced that its Trillium Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) FastPath software has achieved a tenfold performance improvement over generic user-space SCTP implementations. Trillium SCTP FastPath leverages the 6WINDGate packet processing software suite from 6WIND. Its optimized performance is delivered via the FlexPacket ATCA-PP50 deep packet inspection (DPI) blade from Continuous Computing featuring dual NetLogic Microsystems XLR732 multicore processors.

Trillium says the choice of generic user-space SCTP as the IP transport layer for mobile data networks has placed a huge strain on SCTP processing that was not envisioned when the SCTP protocol was defined. This strain will be felt in the femtocell market where a single femtocell gateway will manage hundreds of thousands of connected femtocells, as well as in the LTE market where the mobility management entity in the evolved packet core (EPC) will face similar challenges from the multitude of small cell deployments.