The 5G Standard

Interoperable Small Cells

Interoperable Small Cells

Sep 10,2014

ETSI has finalised a Report on the 2nd Small Cell LTE Plugfest, organised in partnership with the Small Cell Forum and held at the Orange Labs in Paris.

During ten days of testing 65 experts from a variety of organizations (26 in total) cooperated on debugging vendor solutions and used lab time to tackle potential ambiguities in the standards, which will help feedback fixes to the interface specifications (See the event Report, for “feedback on base specifications”).

Test sessions concentrated on S1, X2 and management interfaces, covering areas such as Security, Management, Voice Support via CS Fall-back Schemes, Voice and Video over LTE, Commercial Mobile Alert Systems and Self Organising Networks. One of the key areas of focus was the testing of multi-vendor mobility and SON in heterogeneous networks.

The event was supported by a remote test infrastructure supplied by ETSI, giving participants a chance to anticipate and mitigate connectivity problems and to run remote pre-testing to ensure that once at the event the test cases had the maximum chance of success.

Further Reading

experts2About the Small Cell Forum (SCF)

The Small Cell Forum (www.smallcellforum.org) supports the wide-scale adoption of small cells. Small cells are low-power wireless access points that operate in licensed spectrum, are operator-managed and feature edge-based intelligence. They provide improved cellular coverage, capacity and applications for homes and enterprises as well as metropolitan and rural public spaces. They include technologies variously described as femtocells, picocells, microcells and metrocells.

The Forum has conducted four previous Plugfests on topics including device interoperability, management and 3GPP standards. Background on Small Cell Forum’s plugests is available from http://scf.io/doc/085.

About ETSI

ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged, broadcast and internet technologies.

www.etsi.org 

Note: Much of the above text is taken from the web news story from ETSI; Small Cell LTE Plugfest 2, which has a link to the event blog containing a series of photos of the event.