Patexia seeks prior art for a US patent which allegedly describes a method of enhancing the efficiency of a random access preamble procedure by enhancing the reinitiation efficiency when a contention happens.

When people switch on their smartphone (UE, user equipment), before making any phone call and connecting to Internet, the UE has to perform an RRC (radio resource control) establishment procedure, which means  firstly connecting to the correct network by base station, and then sending the request of connection to the base station. This initial request and response procedure is called random access preamble procedure (as shown in Figure 1.).

Figure 1. Initial connection between smartphone (UE) and base station

The problem here is that if there are multiple UEs at the same time in the same place sending out the same random access preamble to the same base station, neither the base station or the network can distinguish between different UEs. Traditionally, when there’s a contention under this condition, UEs receive contention resolution message and try to set up a re-establishment procedure. This happens back and forth many times between multiple UEs and the same base station, thus lowering the communication efficiency.

The patent allegedly describes a system/method for enhancing efficiency of RRC procedure re-initiation. If there is a contention situation, the RRC procedure will initiate a contention based random access procedure stored in the physical layer of UEs. And a UE can automatically initiate an RRC establishment procedure if it receives a contention resolution message initiated by another UE who tries to re-establish. On the other hand, this UE can also automatically initiate an RRC re-establishment procedure if it receives a contention resolution message initiated by another UE who tries to establish.

This Contest is related to the following Mobile Phone Connection Contests. Similar references are allowed; however, the five Contests focus on different features and have different questions. All five Contests have the same list of Known References.

1. Data Division of a Service Data Unit
2. HARQ Control of MIMO Handoff
3. Efficient Random Access Preamble Procedure
4. RLC Variable Reset
5. HARQ with TTI Bundling

Questions

1. Was the reference filed or published before November 22nd, 2007?
2. Does the reference describe a system that enhances the efficiency of the establishment or re-establishment of a radio resource control (RRC) connection between a mobile device and a base station by enhancing the reinitiation efficiency when a contention happens?
3. Does the mobile device start the connection process by initializing an RRC connection establishment or re-establishment procedure?
4. Does the mobile device start a random access preamble procedure after initiating the associated RRC connection establishment or re-establishment procedure?
5. After the mobile device finishes the random access preamble procedure, does it (either in an RRC connection establishment procedure or re-establishment procedure) transmit an RRC connection request message?
6. If the mobile device receives a contention resolution message of an RRC connection establishment procedure initiated by a different mobile device when it is trying to re-establish a connection, will this mobile device recognize it as incorrect and start an RRC connection re-establishment procedure again?
7. If the mobile device receives a contention resolution message of an RRC connection re-establishment procedure initiated by a different mobile device when it is trying to establish a connection, will this mobile device recognize it as incorrect and start an RRC connection establishment procedure again?
8. Does the reference describe a mobile device with a processor and a storage device to process code to carry out the described establishment and re-establishment of the RRC connection?