TECHNOLOGY
ASK THE EXPERTS

Have a Question for the UMA Experts? Send it to experts@kineto.com

Patrick Tao
Vice President, Technology

Patrick Tao, Kineto's vice president of technology, leads the company's efforts in continued innovations and applications of UMA/GAN technology and manages technology relationships with mobile network operators and network equipment providers. Mr. Tao is also responsible for driving GAN evolution standards through the 3GPP standards body.   view full bio
Home Node Bs (HNB)
What is an HNB? Within 3GPP, the RAN Working Group 3 (WG3) has been tasked with the development of a standard interface between a femtocell and the mobile core network. RAN WG3 decided to refer to a 3G femtocell as Home NodeB, or HNB.
What is the HNB reference architecture?
The HNB architecture is an access network-based approach similar to UMA/GAN, leveraging existing interfaces into mobile core network and supporting all existing circuit, packet and IMS services. The architecture defines two new network elements, the HNB (or femtocell access point) and the Home NodeB Gateway (HNB-GW). Between these elements is a new Iu-h interface.

The HNB is installed at the customer premise and includes a 3G radio that enables existing mobile phones (or UEs) to connect to the HNB in the same manner as mobile phones access the macro 3G network. The HNB also includes radio management capabilities and NodeB functionality.

The HNB Gateway is installed at the mobile core network, providing security, aggregation and core network interfaces for HNBs deployed over the IP access network.

The new Iu-h interface between the HNB and HNB-GW provides a secure, reliable communications link between the network elements. The Iu-h interface also supports a device management link to enable highly scalable ad-hoc deployments and flexible access controls.

Is the 3GPP HNB standard complete?
It is nearly done. The Iu-h interface, which communicates between the Home NodeB (or femtocell) and the RAN Gateway is completed. There is still work continuing on the security protocol and femtocell access point management system. These elements should be defined by the end of 2009.
What is Kineto's interest in HNB?
Kineto is heavily involved with the femtocell market. With our channel partners NEC, Motorola Networks and Ubiquisys, Kineto is involved in many femtocell field trials based on the 3GPP UMA/GAN standard.

Kineto worked diligently with other companies at 3GPP to reach a consensus HNB architecture that combined key attributes of the current 3GPP UMA/GAN standard with best of breed capabilities from other vendors/approaches.

Over time, it is expected that the GAN-based field trials and commercial deployments will migrate to the 3GPP HNB standard as it is completed. In parallel, the Kineto RAN Gateway is being extended to support the HNB standard. Except for the syntax of the HNB Iu-h interface, the HNB-GW performs the same function in the femtocell access network as the current RAN Gateway. This means that there is a direct upgrade path to Iu-h support for deployed Kineto-based RAN Gateways.

Kineto is a leader is delivering mobile services over IP access networks and is committed to supporting 3GPP standards, including GAN and the soon-to-be completed HNB.