Prioritization of mobile terminating radio resource control connections

A method of establishing a connection between mobile terminating user equipment and a terminating base station, comprising:

• receiving, by the terminating base station, an indication that a first mobile terminating (MT) user equipment (UE) is being paged for a voice call from a mobile originating (MO) UE, wherein an originating base station gives the voice call a higher priority than non-voice communications;
• transmitting, by the terminating base station to the first MT UE, a paging message that includes a header field, the header field includes a page reason indicator indicating that the first MT UE is being paged for the voice call and a unique identifier for the first MT UE, the terminating base station including the header field in the paging message based on a determination that the first MT UE is being paged for the voice call;
• receiving, by the terminating base station from the first MT UE, a first Radio Resource Control (RRC) Connection Request message including a first establishment cause indicating that the first MT UE is requesting a connection with the terminating base station for the voice call;
• receiving, by the terminating base station from a second MT UE, a second RRC Connection Request message, the second RRC Connection Request message including a second establishment cause, the second establishment cause being generic;
• determining, by the terminating base station, that the transmission hardware of the terminating base station does not have sufficient resources to establish new connections for both the first MT UE and the second MT UE;
• determining, based on the first establishment cause in the first RRC Connection Request message and the second establishment cause in the second RRC Connection Request message, that the voice call corresponding to the first RRC Connection Request message has a higher priority than the second RRC Connection Request messages;
• and
• sending, by the terminating base station to the first MT UE in response to the first RRC Connection Request message having the higher priority, an RRC Connection Setup message to the first MT UE.

A mobile terminating (MT) user equipment (UE), comprising:

• one or more processors;
• a radio interface;
• and memory storing computer-executable instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform operations comprising:
• receiving, from a first base station via the radio interface, while the MT UE is in a Radio Resource Control (RRC) idle mode, an aggregated paging message that includes a header field that includes a page reason indicator indicating that the MT UE is being paged for a voice call and a unique identifier of the MT UE that is separate and distinct from the page reason indicator, the aggregated paging message is associated with paging at least one other MT UE,
• wherein the voice call is from a mobile originating (MO) UE and is prioritized by an originating base station connected to the MO UE higher than non-voice communications, the first base station different than the originating base station;
• determining that the aggregated paging message includes the unique identifier for the MT UE;
• at least partially in response to determining that the aggregated page message includes the unique identifier of the MT UE, sending, to the first base station via the radio interface, a RRC Connection Request message including a value in an establishment cause field, the value indicating to the base station that a connection with the base station is being requested for the voice call;
• receiving from the first base station, an RRC Connection Setup message in response to the value having a higher priority than a value in an RRC Connection Request from the at least one other MT UE, wherein the first base station does not have sufficient resources to establish new connections for both the MT UE and the at least one other MT UE.