What are the advantages to be having PCO IE in LTE

Question

As far as my understanding PCO helps to know more information about the network like default gateway address, DNS address, etc.. But what happens if we dont have PCO IE feature in LTE. I want to undestand what are the advatages with PCO in lte.

Thanks in Advance.

Comments

Are you talking about any specific case of PCO in general as PCO is applicable at many places i.e. NAS, Diameter etc etc, please clarify more on the query.

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Thanks for the response salil.

I am talking about general situaions where PCO IE is being sent in the request. Either UE to Network or vice-versa.

Answer 1

In a NAS message Protocol Configuration Options (PCO) can be carried by many different messages as follows.
PDN Connectivity Request
ActivateDefaultEPSBearerContextRequest
ActivateDefaultEPSBearerContextAccept

Data Structure of PCO is also very flexible (gives lot of difficulties in message decoding process). The purpose of the Protocol Configuration Options (PCO) is to provide additional optional information about the destination network that the UE is connecting to. e.g. when a UE connects to the Internet it will be given an IP address and it will be given a PCO that includes the default gateway IP address, the DNS server address, etc. All of these additional type of information are given in the PCO and upto the network to support or not support.

Read more at: http://tech.queryhome.com/37946/lte-use-of-protocol-configuration-options-pco

Comments

Thanks Salil.

So you say it is additional feature that LTE provides. Am I correct?

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Not additional feature but flexi IE though it depends what u call a feature.