OREANDA-NEWS. NEC Corporation announced that it successfully completed interoperability testing of its Multi-vendor SON and Small Cell Femto Solution at the Small Cell LTE Plugfest 2. The Plugfest was held from 23 June to 2 July 2014, organised by the Small Cell Forum, in partnership with ETSI, and hosted by the Orange Labs in Paris. The Plugfest was supported by 27 companies, including equipment vendors, test tool vendors and companies providing test network infrastructure.

Testing concentrated on S1 and X2 interfaces in a multi-vendor environment, such as Regression Testing, Handover, Mobility and SON. As well as testing small cell/macro cell handover and security gateways, another key area of focus was the testing of auto-tuning SON features in multi-vendor heterogeneous networks (HetNets). SON test cases were provided by the Next Generation Mobile Network (NGMN) P-SmallCells project, which is driving the development of multi-vendor SON. The test cases covered the major SON features such as self-configuration of neighbor relations, load balancing and self-optimization of mobility, coverage and capacity.

NEC demonstrated the effectiveness of the 3GPP LTE standards in ensuring interoperability between Small Cell Gateway Systems and LTE Small Cell access points to Evolved Packet Core (EPC) equipment to verify the S1 interface implementations. Also, NEC's microcell eNodeB successfully connected to the macro eNodeB via X2 interfaces in a multi-vendor environment and demonstrated good interoperability of the auto-tuning SON features.

In this event, NEC and participating vendors demonstrated that the multi-vendor HetNet solution is a reality and enables operators to benefit from higher levels of innovation that truly open, interoperable multivendor networks bring while reducing costs.

NEC has been a leading vendor in the supply of Small Cell solutions since 2009. NEC has an extensive track record in the Small Cell market, having made agreements with more than 20 telecom carriers around the world to deliver comprehensive Small Cell systems.

Going forward, NEC will continue interconnectivity tests with leading global vendors in order to prove that Small Cell solutions can enable quick and smooth deployment for mobile operators globally.