Femtozone Applications

In this section: Introduction The Seven Unique Traits of the Femtocell Femtocell: A Unique Device Service Delivery Platform Implementing Femtozone Services and Applications Femtozone Service Architectures

Bringing My Mobile Life Home, Bringing My Home Life to My Mobile

Beyond the traditional business drivers of improved indoor coverage and capacity savings, femtocells have a strong appeal as a delivery platform for a new class of valueadded services. These services are referred to as femtozone services to distinguish them from the vanilla voice and data access services provided by the femtocell. Femtocells are strategically located in the home and they are the only devices that are part of both the home network and the operators network. As such, the y can play a crucial role in the home by bridging mobile and home devices and enabling a new class of tightly-converged services. In this respect, femtocells have the potential to become game-changing devices. And they can change the big game, namely that of the connected digital home. In fact, in the fierce battle to determine which device will be the center of the digital living room of tomorrow, femtocells have several advantages over other contenders such as the PC, the set-top box, the router/home gateway, and the media gateway. Specifically, femtocells have seven characteristics that set them apart from all other devices in the home (see The Seven Unique Traits of the Femtocell). Because of these characteristics, femtocells have the potential of becoming the center of the digital home user experience. By providing the most natural bridge between mobile and wired worlds both at home and away, femtocells can deliver user experiences in the home that are intrinsically and seamlessly mobile. The new class of femtozone services takes advantage of these unique enablers provided by the femtocell. In addition to creating new services, it is possible to smoothly

integrate the femtocell with existing mobile and fixed-line service platforms, so that its presence in the home can be used to also enhance existing services.

Femtozone Service Library

The femtozone service ecosystem is still at a nascent stage. However, several examples of femtozone applications are already available in various forms. A few of these services are starting to be commercially deployed. In the following, we provide short summaries and links to some of the basic femtozone service examples, to give an idea of the type of services enabled by the femtocell.

Family Alert Service: When a family member arrives home or leaves, the femtocell automatically sends an SMS message. For example, a parent at work can be notified that their child has arrived home from school.

Virtual Home Number: A home phone number that rings on all the handsets at home when a call comes in to that number. Media Synchronization: Ability to synchronize music tracks and video clips automatically between a mobile handset and a home PC. Photo Upload: Ability to upload photos automatically from the handset to a home PC when handset arrives home and display the photos to a digital picture frame.

Contact/Calendar Synchronization: Ability to synchronize handset calendar/contacts with home personal and family calendars/contacts every time the handset arrives home.

Remote Control: Ability of the mobile phone to function as a remote control for home devices (DVR, DVD, TV) when it is in the home. Mobile Video: Ability to stream videos from DVR/DVD player directly to your mobile phone. Family Tablet: Ability to enable a group of family communication features on an in-home display to show the geographic locations of household members, display household calendar and reminder

messages, access voicemail and text messages, and store and display pictures from the mobile phone.

Point-of-Sale promotion: Femtocells in retail spaces allow merchants to detect customers presence and provide welcome messages, coupons, and store directory services.

Virtual PBX: In an office setting, the femtocell combined with IP-PBX software on the corporate network can make mobile phones into virtual extensions on the office phone system.

The Seven Unique Traits of the Femtocell

Femtocell as a Game-Changing Device in the Connected Digital Home

Femtocells are potentially game-changing devices in the connected digital home, as they can play a major role in home entertainment services, family communications, and converged services.

Femtocells can enable new services because they have seven unique traits that set them apart from all the other devices in the home in terms of service delivery. They are:

Trait 1. Mobile/Home Network Bridging Trait 2. Presence Trait 3. Universal Anchor to Home Network Trait 4. Managed Service Delivery Platform Trait 5. Local Traffic Injection Point Trait 6. Transparent Mobile Broadband Trait 7. Social Networking Tool

Trait 1 Mobile/Home Network Bridging

The femtocell is the only home device that is intrinsically part of both the mobile network and the home network. By definition, the femtocell knows about the mobile devices in the home that camp onto it; the femtocell is also part of the home network, and as such can discover the other home devices connected to it. Since the femtocell is able to talk to both mobile and home devices, it can enable a variety of interactions between them. The femtocell can even translate between the mobile and home network worlds. For example, it can provide DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance, a standard to allow entertainment devices within the home to share their content across a home network) translation, making a legacy mobile device, which often is not a DLNA device, look like a DLNA device to all other DLNA devices in the home network. In this way, the femtocell enables direct communication between mobile devices and any device in the home network. The femtocell can also provide protocol support, for example to enable direct printing from a mobile device to a printer in the home network, or transcoding support, for example to enable media stored in the mobile device to be properly displayed on a TV screen in the home.

Trait 2 Presence

The femtocell is the only home device that always knows when a powered-on mobile device is at home, and thus can provide a strong notion of presence. Accurate presence information in the home is gathered transparently to the user, triggered by the fact that their mobile device camps onto the femtocell. The home presence information may be used as a trigger to enable a variety of new services, such as automatic alerts when family members come home or leave home, automatic content synchronization between the phone and other A/V devices in the home or via the Internet, etc. It can also be used to enhance the presence information of existing applications, such as IM or social site applications. Femtocell presence has several characteristics that distinguish it from presence achieved by other means: i) it does not require any action by the mobile device or the user, since presence is simply a by-product of the mobile device entering or leaving the femtozone, ii) the notion of presence in the home is naturally defined by the radius of the femtozone, which is typically a reasonable approximation of being at home, and iii)

the individual family member is identified simply by association with the corresponding mobile phone number.

Trait 3 Universal Anchor to Home Network

Since the femtocell knows when the user is at home with great accuracy, by definition it also knows when the user is away from home. The femtocell is the most natural home device to anchor the user to his or her home network when he or she is away from home. In fact, since the femtocell is part of the operators network, it can always determine how to reach the mobile user, whether the user is at home or not. Ultimately, the femtocell can transparently maintain a digital pipe tethering the user with his or her home network, both in the home and away. This capability enables services that can offer very similar user experiences both inside the femtozone and away. Remote access of the home network can be achieved by other means. For example, media servers and other appliances, such as the Slingbox, allow remote access of that device. The femtocell differs from these existing solutions in that it provides universal

remote access to all the devices in the home, by keeping the user connected to the home network when remote in a very similar manner to when the user is inside the home. As noted above, this remote connectivity is transparent to the user, and can be provided in an always on fashion that cannot be easily achieved by other means.

Trait 4 Managed Service Delivery Platform

The Femtocell is one device in the home that is managed by the mobile operator. As such, the femtocell has a unique position for the mobile operator to deliver a variety of services not only to the mobile device, but also to other screens in the home. In fact, since the femtocell discovers and communicates with all the devices in the home network, it can become a key node to enable the delivery of converged services. The femtocell thus becomes an important component in the service delivery platform of the mobile operator, by complementing the existing mobile operators platform with a rich set of new service-enabling capabilities.

Trait 5 Local Traffic Injection Point

The femtocell is the first device that provides a direct entry or end point for local traffic to be directly delivered to/from mobile devices in the femtozone. This capability is at the center of a variety of femtozone services providing local communications, such as family intercom, home broadcasting, or localized push-to-talk. The ability of delivering locally-generated traffic to the mobiles in the femtozone also enables unique business applications, such as delivery of promotions or product information to the mobile devices attached to a femtocell in a store. This same capability, combined with the ability of the femtocell to identify individual family members, can also be used as the basis to create a personal portal for each user, or for applying individual policies to the user experience in the home. In general, since the femtocell is at the center of all local communications in the home, as well as part of the operators network and the Internet; it has the potential of becoming an important personalization node. In this role at the convergence point between different networks, the femtocell can collect targeted information for each individual user, while preserving their privacy.

Trait 6 Transparent Mobile Broadband

The femtocell provides a high-bandwidth pipe between mobiles in the home and the other devices in the home network. The distinguishing characteristics from the highbandwidth pipe that can be provided by Wi-Fi to dual-mode mobile devices are transparency and service continuity. In fact, the femtocell pipe is transparently available to the user, since the cellular air interface is always on. Service continuity is preserved when the mobile device leaves the femtozone through the remote access capabilities of the femtocell. These two characteristics facilitate services that require reliable access to high bandwidth, such as a variety of automatic content synchronization services.

Trait 7 Social Networking Tool

The femtocell can become a very powerful social networking tool through the notion of a femto group. A femto group is a number of femtocells that are grouped together according to certain criteria. The grouping may be static or dynamic. The femtocells in a group are logically connected to one another, but may even also have peer-to-peer connectivity among them. An individual femtocell may belong to more than one femtocell group. An example of an application enabled by femtocell groups is friend and family, in which a parent could be notified of their childs arrival or departure from a friends home, in addition to their own. In a corporate example, femtocells deployed across a multi-location enterprise could be associated to allow users at different locations to access corporate PBX-type features such as 4-digit dialing and call transfers. The notion of a femto group allows extending some of the distinguishing capabilities of the femtocell to the group, also in a transparent fashion. For example, presence of the user within the group, rather than just presence of the user at home, can be detected. Similarly, services can be delivered to all the members of the groups, which become a sort of extended family within each specific service.

Femtocell: A Unique Device Service Delivery Platform in the Connected Digital Home
When taken individually, each of the seven unique traits can potentially be achieved by other devices in the home. When thinking about each of these aspects in more detail, however, it becomes apparent that the femtocell can provide this functionality in a much more straightforward and natural manner than any other device in the home. The great appeal and potential of the femtocell is therefore in the package of these characteristics. Each of these traits can be taken advantage of, individually or in combination, to create a new class of femtozone services. The following table gives a few representative examples of how each trait enables unique services.

Of course, these are just some basic examples of new femtozone services. As the femtozone service ecosystem is put in motion and a community of application developers is formed, we will see many more exciting applications that take advantage of the unique capabilities provided by the femtocell.

Implementing Femtozone Services and Applications

Femtozone Service Components

Since the femtocell is at the convergence point of the mobile operators network, the home network, and the Internet, femtozone services may take a wide variety of forms, involving several components. The comprehensive reference architecture in the figure above shows all the components that may be involved in delivering a femtozone service. Of course, specific femtozone applications may only need a subset of these components, depending on their required functionality.

The comprehensive reference architecture may be rationalized in simpler terms by identifying four possible femtozone service application components (again, a specific service application may only use a subset of the four components). Each service component runs on a corresponding femtozone service node.

Mobile device Application Component, running on the Mobile device; Femtocell Application Component, running on the Femtocell; Home Device Application Component, running on one or more Home Device attached to the Femtocell via the home network; and Network Application Component(s), running on a variety of Application Server(s) in the operators network or in the Internet.

Each component runs on the corresponding service node on top of a corresponding service platform, accessible through a set of APIs. Since femtozone services are typically based on the interaction of functionality residing on different service nodes, the set of femtozone APIs in a service node provides access to femtozone service functionality in that service node and in other devices through underlying communication mechanisms.

Femtozone Service Architectures

Femtozone services may be implemented according to different architectures. There are three basic approaches:

Femtocell Centric Architecture. In this approach, the femtozone dependent service logic resides primarily in the femtocell; Network Centric Architecture. In this approach, the femtozone dependent service logic resides primarily in one or more application servers in the network; and

Mobile device Centric Architecture. In this approach, the femtozone dependent service logic resides primarily on the mobile device.

The definitions of these architectures are intentionally left rather vague, since in practice the boundaries of functionality is often blurred, and hybrid approaches are common. In each architecture, the intelligence that takes advantage of the femtocell capabilities is primarily concentrated in one of the service nodes. The blurriness of the definitions

originates from the fact that such intelligence often does not exclusively reside on one node, but needs to be supported in multiple nodes. These architectures have important differences, and for a given femtozone service one architecture may be more appropriate than another. Not all femtozone services can be implemented in all architectures. Femtozone services implemented with different architectures can coexist in the same network. All of these architectures are being defined in the Service Special Interest Group in the Femto Forum.