US Patent 11191015 Efficient communication of network identifiers

In the context of “operator-controlled Wi-Fi” as in 3GPP TR 37,834 vl2,0,0 “Study on Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN)”, both in solution2 and solution3, WLAN identifiers need to be communicated between the radio access network, RAN, and the UE. However, WLAN identifiers (e. g., SSIDs, BSSIDs, ESSIDs, HESSIDs, Realm identifiers, NAIs, PLMN identifiers, Domain Name lists, . . . ) are large (e. g., SSID may be up to 32 bytes) and cause a large overhead in the wireless interface. This problem is solved by providing an indexed listing of WLAN Identifiers and by only exchanging the indices across the wireless interface; Preferably, some WLANs may have several indices, and each index may also be used to convey the action to take by the UE.