Massive deployment of small coverage area cells in the all-IP wireless system - Opportunities, issues and solutions

With the increasing demand of mobile broadband communication and due to the physical limitation in the available wireless spectrum, one of the most preeminent solutions foreseen to maintain the rapid pace of development of wireless systems is the massive deployment of small coverage area cells such as femto or hotspots. However, it requires the inclusion of additional aspects for the wireless core network in order to sustain in a scalable manner the communication not only over the large scale access network, but also over a large number of microcells considering their special requirements in access control and QoS provisioning, seamless handovers, traffic offload and infrastructure sharing. Furthermore trust in the communication over this type of access network has to be ensured through specific security mechanisms. This article analyses the opportunity of such a deployment, the issues that arise and some solutions exemplified on the 3GPP Evolved Packet Core.