RANDOM ACCESS CHANNEL ENHANCEMENTS FOR LTE DEVICES
First Claim
1. A device operating as user equipment (UE) in a Long Term Evolution LTE network, comprising:
- an RF transceiver for providing an LTE air interface for communicating with a base station operating as an enhanced/evolved Node B (eNB);
processing circuitry interfaced to the RF transceiver and arranged to, if no uplink resources for transmitting scheduling requests to the eNB are currently allocated to the device, start a packet aggregation timer, buffer background packets having a relaxed latency requirement, and request uplink resources from the eNB via a random access procedure to transmit the buffered packets upon expiration of the packet aggregation timer.
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Accused Products
Abstract
Described herein is a technique for aggregating background traffic packets by the background users instead of performing a random access procedure to request an uplink resource for each new packet. Since the same physical random access channel (PRACH) resources are used for random access procedures by multiple UEs, collisions can occur. The PRACH is expected to operate with very low collision rates, but if the number of users increases, the collision rate increases as well as the error rate. The disclosed technique reduces the collision rate by reducing the number of random access procedures used to transmit background traffic.
34 Citations
25 Claims
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1. A device operating as user equipment (UE) in a Long Term Evolution LTE network, comprising:
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an RF transceiver for providing an LTE air interface for communicating with a base station operating as an enhanced/evolved Node B (eNB); processing circuitry interfaced to the RF transceiver and arranged to, if no uplink resources for transmitting scheduling requests to the eNB are currently allocated to the device, start a packet aggregation timer, buffer background packets having a relaxed latency requirement, and request uplink resources from the eNB via a random access procedure to transmit the buffered packets upon expiration of the packet aggregation timer. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14)
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15. A method for operating user equipment (UE) in a Long Term Evolution LTE network, comprising:
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if a packet aggregation mode is enabled and uplink resources are currently allocated to the UE by an evolved Node B (eNB), transmitting background packets having a relaxed latency requirement using the currently allocated uplink resources; if the packet aggregation mode is enabled and no uplink resources for transmitting scheduling requests to the eNB are currently allocated to the UE, buffering background packets until expiration of a packet aggregation timer. - View Dependent Claims (16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22)
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23. A method for operating an evolved node B (eNB) in an LTE network, comprising:
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detecting a collision rate among UEs in accessing the physical random access channel (PRACH); and if the detected collision rate exceeds a specified threshold, transmitting a command to user equipment (UE) that the UEs enter a background packet aggregation mode in which background packets are buffered for a specified time before a random access procedure to request uplink resources is performed. - View Dependent Claims (24, 25)
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Specification