Introduction

Management of the radio resources in a GPRS-136 packet-data system is accomplished by means of the Radio Resource Management procedures presented in this standard. Effective management of the radio resources in a GPRS-136 system involves activities in both the mobile station (MS) and the base station (BS). The entities in a GPRS-136 mobile station and base station that are used to achieve the goals of radio resource management are the Radio Resource Management Entity (RRME) and the Broadcast Management Entity (BME).

The functions of GPRS-136 Radio Resource Management are as follows:

PCCH Selection:

To enable a GPRS-136 mobile station to acquire service on a suitable GPRS-136 PCCH within an acceptable period, without the need for any prior knowledge of the PCCHs in the system. This goal is achieved by executing the Packet Control Channel Selection procedure.

Load Balancing:

To evenly distribute the traffic load across one or more PCCHs. When more than one PCCH is available for allocation in the cell, the mobile stations operating in that cell must be evenly distributed across the PCCHs. Furthermore, mobile stations that camp on a particular PCCH must be allocated paging subchannels in such a manner that the paging load is evenly distributed across all available paging time slots on the PCCH. This goal of load sharing is achieved by executing the Packet Control Channel Allocation procedure.

PCCH Reselection:

To provide service continuity to a GPRS-136 mobile station, operating on a PCCH or PTCH through reselection to the best available PCCH. This goal is achieved by executing the Packet Control Channel Reselection procedure.

PCCH/PTCH Assignment:

To provide the capability for the network to reassign an active mobile station to a different PCCH or PTCH within the same cell. This goal is achieved by executing the Channel Assignment procedures.

Power Control:

To provide the capability to control the uplink power of the mobile stations and the downlink power of the base stations.

To achieve the preceding goals, the RRME and BME must interact with other entities in the mobile station and the base station. RRME and BME interact with the physical layer for obtaining radio channel parameters such as signal strength. RRME and BME also interact with the MAC layer and the GPRS-136 Mobility Management layer. The BME entity within the base station interacts with the BME entity within the mobile station through the use of BME related messages broadcast on the F-PBCCH and E-PBCCH subchannels (see TIA/EIA-136-336 [11]). The RRME entity within the base station interacts with the RRME entity within the Mobile Station through the use of point-to-point RRME messages.