Radio access network and network elements for providing mobile communications services
First Claim
1. A radio access network for providing mobile communications services, the radio access network having radio network controlling elements comprising at least one control plane server for providing control plane functions and at least one user plane server for providing user plane functions, the radio access network further having a network element containing a mapping function for interfacing the radio control elements with a core network.
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Accused Products
Abstract
In evolved radio access network architectures the user and the control planes are separated into different network elements. This implies that the core network must exchange control and user information related to a particular user terminal with these two different network elements. Moreover, information not linked to a particular user but to a certain cell or area must also be directed to the appropriate control plane server or user plane server.
In order to hide this separation from the core network a solution is presented here which also enables to hide serving radio network subsystem user plane relocation from the core network. These effects are achieved by the proposed utilization of transport address mapping within the radio access network. Only the new introduced network element containing the mapping function interfaces with the core network. This network element is preferably a transport address mapping server which is able to distinguish control and user plane information belonging to different users and which distributes it to the appropriate control plane server or user plane server. In the other direction the transport address mapping server receives control and user plane information from different servers and forwards it to the appropriate core network node.
46 Citations
7 Claims
- 1. A radio access network for providing mobile communications services, the radio access network having radio network controlling elements comprising at least one control plane server for providing control plane functions and at least one user plane server for providing user plane functions, the radio access network further having a network element containing a mapping function for interfacing the radio control elements with a core network.
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6. A network element in a radio access network for providing mobile communications services, the radio access network having radio network control elements comprising at least one control plane server for providing control plane functions and at least one user plane server for providing user plane functions, the network element of the radio access network containing a mapping function for interfacing the radio control elements with a core network.
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7. A distributed radio network controlling structure in a radio access network for providing mobile communications services, the radio network controlling structure having radio network controlling elements comprising at least one control plane server for providing control plane functions and at least one user plane server for providing user plane functions, the radio controlling structure further comprising a network element containing a mapping function for interfacing the radio controlling elements with a core network.
Specification