Small Cells and Virtual EPC
While some cellular operators are still in the planning or trialing stages, others are ramping up their deployments and expanding into new market areas. Small cells can come in several forms:
- Residential or small or midsize business (SMB) femtocells
- Indoor or outdoor stand-alone picocells
- Distributed radio small cells for large locations
- Carrier-class Wi-Fi hotspots
End-to-end provisioning and management – including a mobile app for field service tasks, devices remote provisioning and firmware management, fault & performance monitoring, dynamic scaling, and self-optimization.
Distributed network architectures are emerging to provide significant scale advantages and flexible deployment options. An example of this is the use of small cell distributed nodes to scale capacity and coverage of cellular networks.
This emerging type of distributed network architecture requires provisioning of the remote infrastructure to onboard new devices (or nodes) and manage them remotely across its lifecycle.
The solution provides orchestration across the various inventories, network, and element management system that are involved in the automation of provisioning. This also assures the quality of installation of new remote devices to the network infrastructure.