The study of IMS functionality in femtocell environment

In this paper, the deployment of IMS functionality in femtocell environment is investigated and overviewed. Femtocell is a small cellular base station designed for use in residential or small business environments. It allows service providers to extend service coverage inside of our home, especially where the existing access is limited or unavailable. In the mean time, the IMS, as emerging framework of fixed and mobile convergence, provides the functionalities that accommodate current and future services in wired and wireless networks (e.g. voice, video and data transfers). Configuring the IMS framework in new approach of network architecture such as femtocell and designing the femtocell network to support IMS services is quite demanding. Some possible network design will be discussed. In this paper we concern on the investigation of IMS SIP signalling when it works on femtocell environment. Another critical issue such as the delay properties of session establishment signalling is also interesting to be discussed. The IMS-based and Cellularbased approaches for the integration of femtocells system and IMS core network are discussed.