Alcatel Lucent

Nigel Bradley

Philip Charles Sapiano

Graham Brend

Tony Putman

Holger Claussen

Philippe Cassuto

Philip Sapiano

A method is provided of deactivating PDP Context upon transfer of a connection with a user terminal between a femtocell base station and a macrocell base station, the method comprising: the femto base station receiving a message including a first identifier of a PDP Context, altering the identifier of a PDP Context to a second identifier, and forwarding the altered message to the core network, the core network receiving a message including an identifier determines that the received identifier does not match the identifier that it expects and so deactivates the PDP Context.

Deactivating packet data protocol context

A femtocell arrangement comprises a plurality of femtocells Femto 1 to Femto 13 having coverage distributed over a region, such as, for example, an office. A border femtocell, Femto 3 or Femto 10, of said plurality has coverage at an entrance to the region and is arranged to operate at a higher transmit power level to provide a larger coverage area than that provided by neighboring femtocells. In addition, the border femtocell may be allocated a specific Primary Scrambling Code (PSC) to show its designation as a border femtocell. An approaching user equipment UE 1 or UE 2 tends to attach to the higher transmit power border femtocells. The Femto Gateway managing the connection is aware of the likelihood that an approaching UE will tend to attach to a border femtocell, and this is further confirmed by the use of a specific PSC. Hence, handover is expedited as the most suitable femtocells may be chosen as targets for handover.

Femtocell arrangements

A method is provided of identifying which one of a plurality of femtocell base stations neighboring a first femtocell base station is to be the target for handover of a call connection with a user terminal from the first base station. The neighbor femtocell base stations use the same primary scrambling code as each other. The femtocell base stations use code-division multiple access, CDMA. Each of the neighbor femtocell base stations transmits a respective broadcast signal that include timing information such that each neighbor femtocell base station transmits a broadcast signal having different timing information to that of the other neighbor femtocell base stations. The user terminal receives broadcast signals, determines the timing information of at least one of the received broadcast signals and reports the timing information to the first femtocell base station. The first femtocell base station identifies the target femtocell base station for handover from the timing information.

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Cricklade, United Kingdom

Nigel Bradley