Big changes to cellular networks to be demonstrated next week

Next Tuesday at the Femtocells World Summit in London, chipmaker picoChip, packet core vendor Starent Networks, and Continuous Computing will give the first live demo of a new 3GPP standard critical to the deployment of IP Radio Access Network-based femtocells.

What's that again? 3GPP is the Third Generation Partnership Project, the international consortium that lays down specs for telecommunications standards. Femtocell is a system for increasing 3G cellular coverage with small, indoor distributed antenna systems. They are sort of like tiny cell towers, hence the femto- prefix which denotes 10^-15, making the name roughly mean "really really small cell."

The new standard that the companies will be showing off next week is called the Release 8 luh interface. In simple terms, a network is made up of a lot of individual elements connected together and sharing information (packets). They are connected by interfaces which have different names like "lub, lur, and lu-PS." See the theme there? luh connects the home femtocell radio network to the outside network. Specifically, it connects to the gateway which is then connected to either circuit switched- for voice and SMS- or packet switched networks.

This small piece of the cellular fabric is important because it allows a great number of tiny 3G radio networks to be linked together on gateways that are integrated into carriers' broader networks. For example, a five hundred room apartment building could conceivably have a femtocell radio in every room, and the Release 8 luh standard will let them all be connected to the same gateway.