Search

US-12621749-B2 - Method and system for enabling and disabling early data transmission

US12621749B2US 12621749 B2US12621749 B2US 12621749B2US-12621749-B2

Abstract

A communication system for enabling/disabling EDT comprises UEs and a network node. The network node is configured to collect measurements regarding cell information, determine whether EDT is allowed to be used by the UEs to transmit data prior to completing an access procedure, and send a message comprising an EDT indication instructing whether EDT is allowed to be used by the UEs. The UE is configured to initiate a transmission to the network node, receive the message comprising the EDT indication, and determine whether EDT is allowed to be used based on the EDT indication. The communication system may be able to enable or disable EDT for the UE based the status of cell, such that the communication system may avoid a resource waste caused by an early indication in Msg1 or a larger uplink grant in Msg2, and further improve the network performance.

Inventors

  • Andreas Höglund
  • Magnus Stattin
  • Tuomas Tirronen
  • Emre Yavuz
  • Yutao Sui

Assignees

  • TELEFONAKTIEBOLAGET LM ERICSSON (PUBL)

Dates

Publication Date
20260505
Application Date
20181025

Claims (20)

  1. 1 . A method for early data transmission at a user equipment comprising: initiating, from a user equipment (UE), a transmission to a network node, wherein the UE is in a first cell; receiving a first system information block (SIB) message comprising a first early data transmission (EDT) indication from the network node, the EDT indication received prior to participating in an access procedure; and determining whether the UE is allowed to use EDT to transmit data prior to completing the access procedure based on the first EDT indication, wherein the first EDT indication is cell-specific and applies to UEs in the first cell.
  2. 2 . The method according to claim 1 , further comprising receiving a second message comprising a second EDT indication, wherein the second EDT indication is UE-specific and instructs whether the UE is allowed to use EDT.
  3. 3 . The method according to claim 2 , wherein the second EDT indication comprises a flag combined with a cell-specific EDT configuration.
  4. 4 . The method according to claim 1 , wherein the first EDT indication is grouped with access barring information.
  5. 5 . The method according to claim 1 , wherein the first EDT indication is added in System Information Block Type 14 (SIB14), SIB1, SIB2, SIB22, an existing SIB, a new SIB, or Master Information Block (MIB).
  6. 6 . The method according to claim 1 , wherein the first EDT indication comprises grouping information, wherein the grouping information is used to configure a set of random access preambles indicated in the first EDT indication.
  7. 7 . The method according to claim 1 , wherein the first EDT indication comprises a configuration in which no preambles are allocated for the first EDT indication.
  8. 8 . The method according to claim 1 , further comprising: receiving an EDT configuration in response to determining whether the UE is allowed to use EDT; and configuring the UE based on the EDT configuration.
  9. 9 . A method for early data transmission at a network node comprising: collecting measurements regarding cell information of a first cell; determining whether early data transmission (EDT) is allowed to be used by user equipments (UEs) in the first cell to transmit data prior to completing an access procedure based on the collected measurements; and sending, to the UEs in the first cell, a first system information block message comprising a first EDT indication instructing whether EDT is allowed to be used by the UEs in the first cell to transmit data prior to completing the access procedure in response to the determination, the EDT indication sent a specific UE prior to the specific UE participating in an access procedure.
  10. 10 . The method according to claim 9 , further comprising sending a second message comprising a second EDT indication generated based on the collected measurements, wherein the second EDT indication is UE-specific and instructs whether a specific UE is allowed to use EDT.
  11. 11 . The method according to claim 10 , wherein the second EDT indication is added in a paging message.
  12. 12 . The method according to claim 9 , wherein the first EDT indication is grouped with access barring information.
  13. 13 . The method according to claim 9 , further comprising sending, to the UEs in the first cell, an EDT configuration in response to the determination.
  14. 14 . A user equipment for early data transmission, comprising: at least one processing circuitry; and at least one storage that stores processor-executable instructions, when executed by the processing circuitry, causes a user equipment to: initiate a transmission to a network node, wherein the UE is in a first cell; receive a first system information block (SIB) message comprising a first early data transmission (EDT) indication from the network node, the EDT indication received prior to participating in an access procedure; and determine whether EDT is allowed to be used to transmit data prior to completing an access procedure in the first cell based on the first EDT indication, wherein the first EDT indication is cell-specific and applies to UEs in the first cell.
  15. 15 . The user equipment according to claim 14 , wherein the instructions further cause the user equipment to receive a second message comprising a second EDT indication, wherein the second EDT indication is UE-specific and instructs whether EDT is allowed to be used by the UE.
  16. 16 . The user equipment according to claim 15 , wherein the second EDT indication comprises a flag combined with a cell-specific EDT configuration.
  17. 17 . The user equipment according to claim 14 , wherein the first EDT indication is grouped with access barring information.
  18. 18 . The user equipment according to claim 14 , wherein the first EDT indication is added in System Information Block Type 14 (SIB14), SIB1, SIB2, SIB22, an existing SIB, a new SIB, or Master Information Block (MIB).
  19. 19 . The user equipment according to claim 14 , wherein the first EDT indication comprises grouping information, wherein the grouping information is used to configure a set of random access preambles indicated in the first EDT indication.
  20. 20 . The user equipment according to claim 14 , wherein the first EDT indication comprises a configuration in which no preambles are allocated for the first EDT indication.

Description

This application is a 371 of International Application No. PCT/IB2018/058338, filed Oct. 25, 2018, which claims the benefit of U.S. Application No. 62/577,463, filed Oct. 26, 2017, the disclosures of which are fully incorporated herein by reference. TECHNICAL FIELD Particular embodiments relate to the field of enabling or disabling early data transmission; and more specifically, to methods, apparatus and systems for enabling and disabling early data transmission for a particular cell or user equipment by including an indication in a system information message. BACKGROUND There has been a lot of work in 3GPP lately on specifying technologies to cover Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and/or Internet of Things (IoT) related use cases. Most recent work for 3GPP Release 13 and 14 includes enhancements to support Machine-Type Communications (MTC) with new UE categories, as in Cat-M1, Cat-M2, supporting reduced bandwidth of up to 6 and 24 physical resource blocks (PRBs), and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) UEs providing a new radio interface, with UE categories Cat-NB1 and Cat-NB2. The LTE enhancements introduced in 3GPP Release 13, 14, and 15 for MTC would be referred as “eMTC”, including but not limited to support for bandwidth limited UEs, Cat-M1/M2, and support for coverage enhancements. This is to separate discussions from NB-IoT used for any Release, although the supported features are similar on a general level. For both eMTC and NB-IoT, Cellular IoT EPS User Plane optimization and Cellular IoT EPS Control Plane optimization signaling reductions were also introduced in Release 13. The former, here referred to as UP-solution, allows the UE to resume a previously stored RRC connection, thus also known as RRC Suspend/Resume. The latter, here referred to as CP-solution, allows the transmission of user-plane data over non-access stratum, i.e. DoNAS. For 3GPP Release 15, new work items (WIs) for Even further enhanced MTC for LTE (LTE_eMTC4) and Further NB-IoT enhancements (NB_IOTenh2) target eMTC and NB-IoT enhancements, respectively. The new WIs for LTE_eMTC4 here is referred to as WI_eMTC, and the new WIs for NB_IOTenh2 here is referred as WI_NBIOT. In both of these, one of the goals for a WI is to reduce UE power consumption and latency through introducing possibilities to send data as early as possible during the Random Access (RA) procedure. WI_eMTC supports early data transmission and evaluates power consumption, latency gain, and specifies necessary support for downlink (DL)/uplink (UL) data transmission on a dedicated resource during the RA procedure, e.g. after physical random access channel (PRACH) transmission and before the RRC connection setup is completed, at least in the RRC Suspend/Resume case. WI_NBIOT evaluates power consumption, latency gain, and specifies necessary support for DL/UL data transmission on a dedicated resource during the RA procedure, after NPRACH transmission and before the RRC connection setup is completed. During RAN2 #99, several contributions on early data transmission (EDT) were discussed, and one of the agreements is to support early UL data transmission in Msg4 for Release 13 UP solution. FIG. 1 illustrates a contention-based RA procedure from TS 36.300, the messages in the RA procedure are commonly referred to as message 1 (Msg1) through message 4 (Msg4). It is commonly agreed that EDT can be enabled for UL Msg3 only, or DL Msg4 only, or both Msg3 and Msg4 depending on actual use cases. In 3GPP, it has been agreed that it should be possible to transmit early data in Msg3 and/or Msg4. Existing solutions for realizing the early data transmission concept have recently been presented in prior art for UP solution. In existing solutions, the UE can indicate its intention of using EDT by the way it selects the preamble in Msg1. However, this requires some sort of preamble partitioning, which has negative impact on (N)PRACH performance. When there is only early DL data in Msg4, for example the UE does not have UL data to send in Msg3, it is desired to avoid such early indication in Msg1 and the partitioning issue. In addition, in UP solution, one approach is to provide a larger UL grant in Msg2 in addition to legacy UL grant to allow for the transmission of data in Msg3. However, when there is no UL data to transmit in Msg3, such provisioned resources are wasted. SUMMARY To address the foregoing problems with existing solutions, disclosed are methods, a user equipment (UE), a network node, and a communication system for early data transmission (EDT) by including an EDT indication in a system information message to enable or disable EDT for the UE. The present disclosure implements a solution to enable or disable the usage of EDT based on the status of a cell or the UE to avoid a collision at the UE or a waste of resources. Several embodiments are elaborated in this disclosure. According to a first embodiment of a method for enabling and disabling EDT at a UE, the method comprises initiating, fr