Automated service provisioning and management for integrated femtocell/Wi-Fi and cellular networks

The explosion of the mobile broadband data traffic and the expected needs of ever increasing bandwidth demand present great challenges and opportunities for mobile operators. To mitigate the challenges, mobile operators usually offload mobile data traffic from cellular networks to alternative networks by utilizing IEEE 802.11 wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) access points and deploying femtocells to leverage their service offering and reduce their operational expenditure (OPEX). The end-to-end services provisioning and management of the integrated femtocell/Wi-Fi and cellular networks is one of the key challenges for fixed-mobile providers. The inter-provider service provisioning involves information exchange interfaces which are basically manually set up and managed. As a result, the service provisioning takes lots of time and work and the OPEX is increased. In this paper, we first describe the business management model of the integrated femtocell/Wi-Fi and cellular networks from the perspective of fixed-mobile providers. We then propose a platform of service provisioning and management for the integrated networks that aims at providing an automated end-to-end quality assured services. To support the provision of better and diversified services to users, advanced management functionality needs to be introduced in the integrated systems, which will enable optimum, end-to-end operation. Finally, the results show that the proposed service provisioning and management which is automated and optimized, significantly reduces the duration of inter-provider service delivery of the integrated network, and reduces the OPEX.