This section introduces aspects that may be helpful to facilitating a better understanding of the inventions. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is in the prior art or what is not in the prior art.
MulteFire™ Alliance (MFA) is an organization dedicated to developing a Long Term Evolution (LTE) based communication technology for small cells operating exclusively in unlicensed spectrum, e.g., the global 5 Gigahertz (GHz) unlicensed band known as the Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) radio band.
MFA defines a Neutral Host Network (NHN) access mode. The NHN access mode is provided to mobile devices (mobiles) based on authorization from the mobile subscriber's preferred Participating Service Provider (PSP) that may or may not be a 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) type Mobile Network Operator. As a consequence, the mobile subscriber may or may not be provisioned with identity typical for the 3GPP subscriptions, e.g., the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI), in a licensed radio band network such as a 3GPP Evolved Packet Core (EPC) network. The IMSI is used to identify the user (mobile subscriber device) of a cellular network and is a unique identification associated with all cellular networks.