US Patent:
20020075859, Jun 20, 2002
Inventors:
Jerry Mizell - Plano TX, US
James Bankhead - Garland TX, US
Bala Balachander - Santa Clara CA, US
International Classification:
H04L012/66
H04L012/28
Abstract:
An inventive method and apparatus support quality of service provisioning for a given mobile terminal without requiring changes to established interfaces for the general packet radio service network by assigning a temporary logical link identifier (TLLI) in a manner that implicitly reflects a QoS rating for a mobile terminal. In one embodiment of the present invention, a serving GPRS support node (SGSN) assigns a temporary logical link identifier (TLLI) within a first range for a first QoS rating and within a second range for a second QoS rating. Alternatively, the SGSN assigns a temporary logical link identifier having an even numerical value for a first QoS rating and an odd numerical value for a second QoS rating. Upon receiving a TLLI value, a base station and the corresponding mobile terminal may both evaluate the TLLI number to determine the assigned QoS rating for the mobile and to allocate communication resources in a corresponding manner. As an additional aspect of the present invention, the base station determines what resources to assign to a mobile terminal based upon a received TLLI number whenever a mobile terminal requests system resources and whenever it registers its presence with the base station.
