User Plane and Control Plane Separation Framework for Home Base Stations

Home base stations (HBSs), which are considered to be useful extensions to mobile operators’ networks, are a promising solution for many issues in mobile communication networks, such as coverage, capacity, and cost. They deliver a great user experience for services in the home or in office buildings using customers’ broadband access for backhaul. However, connecting to the mobile operators’ networks via the Internet brings uncertain delay and hence unreliability into the HBS access architecture, especially the impact on the handover between an HBS and the surrounding base stations. In this paper, we investigate the handover management performance in a typical HBS deployment scenario by analysing the handover procedure durations. A user plane and control plane separation framework is proposed to support uncoordinated HBS integration with the mobile network through unmanaged, generic Internet protocol networks.