Patent ID: 9445243
Filing Date: 2016-09-13
CPC Classification: H04L,H04W

Claim Text:
1. A method comprising: establishing a unicast Evolved Packet Service (EPS) bearer by a user equipment (UE) in a Long-Term Evolution (LTE) network for group communication, wherein the UE belongs to a communication group having a group identifier (ID); receiving access information from the network for monitoring downlink (DL) multicast traffic of the DL group communication; monitoring a multicast Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS) bearer for receiving the DL multicast traffic; and requesting to switch the DL multicast traffic from the multicast MBMS bearer to the unicast EPS bearer upon detecting that the UE is approaching an MBMS coverage boundary, wherein the MBMS coverage boundary provided by a serving base station is defined to be smaller than a cell coverage boundary provided by the same serving base station.