Distributed mobile access point acquisition

Abstract

Providing for distributed access point management for access to a mobile network is described herein. By way of example, an interface application maintained at a Femto cell base station (BS) can facilitate initial power up and/or acquisition for a Femto user terminal (UT). Upon start-up, a bootstrap process is utilized by the Femto cell to provision the UT with an SDL establishing at least one BS as high priority within a particular geographic area (GEO). Thus, when the Femto UT is within the GEO, the UT is more likely to acquire, camp on and/or handoff to the preferred BS. When outside the GEO, a serving access point can provision the Femto UT OTA with a custom SDL suited to another GEO having a different high priority access point. By implementing access point management at distributed access points, expensive network equipment can be mitigated or avoided.