The Design and Implementation of the RUA Protocol in the Home Node B

Femtocell is an effective solution to improve indoor coverage for mobile/cellular network and to enhance the system capacity. 3GPP has proposed Femtocell Network Architecture (FNA) to integrate Home Node B (HNB) and Node B with Radio Network Controller (RNC). In this paper, we describe 3GPP FNA and its related Iuh protocols. Specifically, we focus on the RANAP User Adaptation (RUA) protocol, which is a lightweight mechanism to replace the SCCP and M3UA protocols in RNC. We describe the design and implementation of the RUA protocol through Message Queue (MQ) method and primitive flow model, which can work on different platforms. We also develop simulation experiments to investigate performance improvement with SCCP/M3UA protocols. This study indicates that the RUA protocol can improve the processing time by 20-40%.