Patent ID: 8493917

Claim:
A method in a radio base station of assigning a preamble to a user equipment (UE) for enabling the UE to perform a random access, the radio base station being allocated a first set of non-dedicated random access preambles and a second set of dedicated random access preambles, the method comprising: determining a dedicated random access preamble, of the second set, available for assignment to the UE; and transmitting to the UE a message including an identification number of the available dedicated random access preamble and information indicating in which of at least one physical random access channel (PRACH) occurrence the dedicated random access preamble is valid to be used by the UE for random access, wherein the information includes a field having a binary value indicative of the at least one PRACH occurrence and corresponding to a PRACH index associated with a predefined configuration indicating in which of at least one allowed PRACH occurrence the dedicated random access preamble is valid to be used by the UE for random access for enabling the UE to transmit the available dedicated random access preamble.