SafeNet Develops Femtocell Security Solutions

Femtocells (News - Alert), which are cellular mini base stations, have emerged as an alternative means to offer localized coverage and capacity and improve quality of service in residential and small businesses. Researches suggest that the number of femtocell deployments by the end of 2013 may exceed 40 million. As the market is getting ready for femtocell revolution, related service providers are also preparing to grab their share by offering tailor-made solutions to femtocell deployments.

 

Safenet, a global provider of information security solutions, said it is ready with embedded security solutions for femtocell-enabled networking. The company plans to showcase them at the Second Annual Femtocell (News - Alert) Deployment World Summit, November 4-6, 2008 in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

 

In femtocell deployments, communication between client devices and carrier’s core network must be secure, and mutual authentication of the peers and the privacy of the data exchanged must be ensured, Safenet said.

 

Safenet offers two solutions, SafeXcel IP Packet Engines and QuickSec/IPsec, for Femtocell toolkit. These solutions have been optimized for fast and affordable integration of security features into home base stations, such as femtocells, and telecom networking equipment, such as femto gateways (FGW).

 

The low power, close range femtocell access points (FAPs) and femto gateways (FGWs) leverage ubiquitous broadband IP communications for the backhaul of cellular voice communications.

 

SafeNet’s (News - Alert) SafeXcel IP Packet Engines provide high performance, low power, reduced gate count IPsec offload for cost-sensitive femtocell designs, says Safenet. The IPsec security toolkit, QuickSec/IPsec, for Femtocell provides complete solution for protecting the IP traffic between the deployed femtocell access points (FAP) and the carrier’s femtocell gateway (FGW) to the end user equipment.

 

The two solutions, when built into the same platform, provides a complete, proven and easy-to-integrate security offering for building solutions for femtocell-enabled networks, reducing both development cost and time to market.

 

Femtocells address the demand for bandwidth and quality of coverage. They are capable of offering extensive coverage indoors, and they may form an integrated part of the initial rollouts of long-term evolution (LTE (News - Alert)) networks. Femtocells are expected to boost the revenues of telecom operators. However, their deployments are yet to take off in a big way.