Collaborative Research Project within the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission

Partners :

Sagem Communications, France (Project Coordination)
NEC Europe Ltd., Great Britain (Technical Management)
Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo, Spain
DOCOMO Communications Laboratories Europe GmbH, Germany
Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa Sp. z.o., Poland
Qualcomm CDMA Technologies GmbH, Germany
TTI Norte, S. L., Spain
mimoOn GmbH, Germany
Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya, Spain
Commissariat à l'énergie atomique – LETI, France
University of Oulu, Finland
University of Surrey, Great Britain

January 2010 to June 2012

Broadband services play an important role in stimulating and fuelling the European economy. It is becoming increasingly clear that the expansion of the broadband base to a larger population is a necessary condition for enabling these services. BeFEMTO develops evolved femtocell technologies enabling the cost-effective provisioning of ubiquitous broadband services with the aim of accelerating the uptake of next generation mobile broadband in support of the desirable rollout of broadband access across Europe.

The BeFEMTO project addresses these challenges in a pragmatic way by targeting both near- and longer-term solutions:

• As for near-term solutions, BeFEMTO investigates innovative techniques for standalone femtocells based on LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) that will exhibit great advances towards higher spectral efficiencies. Key enablers in this respect are advanced RF, interference and radio resource management procedures and co-existence with macrocells.
• Longer-term solutions focus on novel concepts such as networked femtocells for enterprise environments, outdoor relay femtocells for extending cell-edge capacity and mobile femtocells for public transport systems. The developed technologies will enable new market and business opportunities for service providers.

BeFEMTO has a strong consortium of key industrial and leading-edge academic partners, supported by an Advisory Board for regulatory and standardization issues, with distinguished experts (e.g. from ETSI, OFCOM and FemtoForum).

Figure 1: The four BeFEMTO themes

NEC performs the Technical Management of the BeFEMTO project and leads the work on architecture, access control & authentication, mobility management, traffic optimization and network management. NEC’s goals within BeFEMTO are to further strengthen its leadership in integrated enterprise femtocell solutions and to develop advanced technologies that enable an even more resource-efficient and resilient yet much simpler femtocell network operation & management.

Please find the project’s publications at the official BeFEMTO web site.

Official BeFEMTO Web Site