Abstract:
Disclosed herein is a method that enables a radio access network (RAN) to page more mobile stations concurrently. By reducing the size of the individual page record, more page records can fit within a general page message (GPM), and thus more mobile stations can receive page messages. One method of reducing the size of an individual page record is to reduce the size of the terminal IDs that page records carry. Currently, terminal IDs are globally unique, but they can be shortened if replaced with locally unique IDs. These locally unique IDs are unique for only mobile stations in a given paging area, unique for only mobile stations assigned to a given paging channel time slot, and/or unique for only mobile stations in a subgroup of mobile stations assigned to a given paging channel time slot. The number of mobile stations in any of these groups is smaller than the number of mobile stations in the global network. Therefore, the length of a terminal ID that is unique for only mobile stations in one of these groups can be shorter than a globally unique identifier.