Introduction

23.2513GPPArchitecture and functional descriptionNetwork sharingRelease 17TS

Network sharing is a way for operators to share the heavy deployment costs for mobile networks, especially in the roll-out phase. In the current mobile telephony marketplace, functionality that enables various forms of network sharing is becoming more and more important. These aspects have not really been addressed before Release 6 in 3GPP UTRAN based access networks, before Release 8 in 3GPP E-UTRAN based access networks and before Release 10 in 3GPP GERAN based access networks, although there has been functionality that supports a very basic type of network sharing since the Release 5 versions of the 3GPP specifications.

To cope with 3GPP pre-Release 6 UTRAN UEs and with non supporting 3GPP GERAN UEs, this specification describes extra functionality for MSCs, SGSNs, BSCs and RNCs in order to provide network sharing functionality to "non-supporting UEs".

In this Release of the specifications, all UTRAN and E-UTRAN capable UEs are required to support the UTRAN and E-UTRAN network sharing requirements. Hence the E-UTRAN and MMEs (which were introduced in 3GPP Release 8) do not need functionality to handle "non-supporting UEs".

Scenarios and user requirements are described in TR 22.951 [1], while the current document presents the stage 2 details and descriptions of how these requirements are supported in a 3GPP GERAN, UTRAN and/or E-UTRAN based network.