Tuesday, September 8, 2015

LTE - BEARERS

LTE - DATA BEARERS

We all know the Default & dedicated bearers established in LTE. Do we know how many such bearers can be established???

Any works only in NAS will say 2 to 11, based on the EPS bearer Identity. If we dig deep across the following specs of NAS, RRC, MAC & UE conformance, we can come to a conclusion that only 8 bearers are successfully established at a time for a UE.

Funda behind the Bearers:

NAS identifies the Bearers based on the EPS - bearer identity which has a range from 0 to 15

In that 0 to 4 are reserved, so 5 to 15 are used for EBI allocation for every bearer that is created.
This counts to 11 from EPC perspective.

From the RRC spec, 36.331 rel 12.3, MaxDRB's per UE = 11

From the RRC spec, 36.331 rel 12.3, LogicalChannelIdentity for DRB = 3 to 10 (Integer values)

Each Bearer will be mapped from NAS/RRC/MAC as EBI/DRB/LCID

Since the LCID in MAC is having the range from 3 to 10, only 8 DRB's can be established per UE @ a time in LTE. So the Limitation comes in the Logical Channel Identity mapping for the data bearers.

From 36.508, DRB configuration is as follows:

If EBI = X + 4; 
Then
DRB ID = X && LCID = X + 2;

Since we have already seen that the Logical Channel Identity range is from 3 to 10, LTE cannot have more than 8 bearers @ a time as of now till Rel 12.3

Hope this helps in better understanding.

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