What is LIPA?

Local IP Access (LIPA) is the ability for an IP-enabled device to access a consumer’s home-based local area network as well as the broader Internet directly using the air interface of a femtocell, or Home NodeB (HNB). Using LIPA allows for greater performance, innovative services that mesh mobile and home networks, and the off-loading of traffic from the operator’s packet core network which is ultimately destined for the Internet.

 

Why LIPA?
As connected device (i.e., mobiles, laptop data cards, USB dongles, etc.) penetration increases globally, more and more users are using their mobile devices not just for voice but also for data services. Today’s high-speed mobile broadband access technologies—

including Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) and Long Term Evolution (LTE)—are ensuring that users have the dual benefits of high mobility and high speed data access. The ever-increasing content available online via email, social networking sites, blogs, RSS feeds, multimedia calls, streaming video and online music coupled with faster and higher capacity equipment driven by personal digital assistants (PDAs), smartphones and netbooks have led to a boom in the demand for Internet data access using high-speed mobile network infrastructure.

Requirements Related to LIPA

The requirements for Local IP Access can be broadly classified into two main categories: LIPA to the home network and IP access to the Internet. For LIPA to the home network, the User Equipment (UE) should be able to exchange data via the operator’s core network and LIPA to the home-based network simultaneously, depending upon the destination.
The HNB should decide, based upon policies, whether to route the data via the core network or to use LIPA.
Furthermore, the UE should be able to access other devices on the home network via the HNB using the HNB only as an access medium.