Security and Mobility Aspects of Femtocell Networks

This chapter discusses security and mobility aspects of femtocell networks, given protocol level descriptions in the subsections. The connectivity between FAP and core network has a high risk of being compromised. The chapter discusses how Host Identity Protocol (HIP) can be adapted in femtocell technology to improve security and mobility issues. This chapter presents several enhancements to the femtocell technology such as strong authentication, service registration, identity verification, and node multihoming. In addition, Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) is used to provide confidentiality, data origin authentication, connectionless integrity, anti-replay service, and limited traffic flow confidentiality. Furthermore, enhanced mobility support by means of locator/identity separation and node multihoming is discussed in the scope of 3GPP femtocells.