INTERNAL

RAU Reject When LTE UE Moving to 3G network

Yin Xing 163982

Keywords
RAU,MME, SGSN, TAI, NAS, Context Request, P-TMSI, Delay, CSFB.

Symptom
Routing area update failed every time when UE move from LTE netwok to 3G network.
From UU interface monitoring, we found all the RAU failures were because UE received
a RAU reject message from 3G network, further troubleshooting are required.

Cause Analysis
To locate the problem, we checked Routing Area Update Reject meassage and found
that the cause was ms-identity-cannot-be derived-by-the-network (9) as following:

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As we know, after RAU request, The new SGSN uses the old RAI received from the UE
to derive the old MME address, and sends a Context Request (P-TMSI, old RAI, New
SGSN Address, P-TMSI Signature) message to the old MME to get the context for the
UE. To validate the Context Request the old MME uses a NAS token mapped from the
P-TMSI Signature. So the only three reasons for ms-identity-cannot-be derived-by-the-
network are:
a) SGSN cant reach the old MME
b) Old RAI is not correct
c) P-TMSI signature validate failure.
From the RAU request message we can see the old RAI is correct:

So, SGSN cant reach the old MME and P-TMSI signature validate failure should be
the cause.
To pinpiont the problem, we contact the provider of MME and 3G SGSN to confirm if the
routes between 3G SGSN and MME were defined correctly or not and the connection
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between 3G SGSN and MME is good or not. The feedback shows that MME and 3G
SGSN are the same physical entity, so there should not be connection problem, but
cooperating ware not defined in 3G side, which means all MME were not defined in all
3G SGSN. Due to this cooperating configuration missing, SGSN couldn't route the
Context Request message to MME, and eventually cause the rejection because of SGSN
couldnt get the UE information.

Handling Process
Configure the following MME Group ID(LAC:0X8000) and MME code(RAC:0X1) in all 3G
SGSN nodes:

After reconfiguration, problem solved.

Suggestions and Summary

This RAU rejection will not cause any service failure, but it will extend the delay to some
of the services such as CSFB. Since every time after RAU rejection, UE have to initiate
an attach procedure to re attach to the destination network, and this will introduce around
0.2 seconds latency to CSFB service according to field test, which is also not acceptable
for this delay sensitive kind of services.

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