Indoor Location and Timing for Femtocells

Where GPS Fails

Femtocells, or Home Base Stations, are equivalent to tiny cell towers for the home. These devices hold great promise for consumers and wireless service providers alike. For consumers, the promise is perfect coverage inside the home; for service providers, the promise is reducing network costs by offloading in-the-home voice and data traffic from the Radio Access Network onto the Internet.

The challenge for femtocell manufacturers and service providers is that cell towers are highly dependent on GPS for timing and location for basic operation and for 9-1-1 caller location identification.  However, GPS and A-GPS are unreliable in many of the indoor environments in which femtocells will be deployed.  A resident of an apartment building can't be expected to pull a GPS antenna to the roof in order to use a femtocell, yet femtocell customers will expect call handoff to the macro network and 9-1-1 service despite the indoor deployment.

Rosum provides to femtocell manufacturers and wireless carriers reliable timing (frequency and phase stability that meet or exceed UMTS and CDMA requirements) and FCC Phase II E9-1-1 compliant location for femtocell applications.

For more information, please contact us at info@rosum.com.