Uplink In-Order Delivery for QOS Flow Offloaded in 5GC Multi-RAT Dual Connectivity

An apparatus comprising:

• a memory;
• and
• processing circuitry in communication with the memory, wherein the processing circuitry is configured to:
• establish an uplink forwarding tunnel with a source node using a tunnel endpoint identifier (TEID) address after a determination is made to offload a quality of service (QoS) flow of a user equipment (UE) from the source node to a target node;
• buffer packets associated with the QoS flow received from the UE after establishment of the uplink forwarding tunnel;
• decode a General Packet Radio Service Tunneling Protocol-User Plane (GTP-U) end marker packet received from the source node via the uplink forwarding tunnel;
• and
• in response to reception of the GTP-U end marker packet from the source node via the uplink forwarding tunnel, encode the buffered packets for transmission to a 5th Generation 5G) core network.

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium that stores instructions for execution by one or more processors of a 5th generation (5G) node, the one or more processors to configure the node to, when the instructions are executed:

• establish an uplink forwarding tunnel between a source node and a target node using a tunnel endpoint identifier (TEID) address after a determination is made to offload a quality of service (QoS) flow of a user equipment (UE) to the target node;
• if the node is the source node, receive a Service Data Adaptation Protocol (SDAP) packet data unit (PDU) from the UE comprising an end marker and, in response, transmit a General Packet Radio Service Tunneling Protocol-User Plane (GTP-U) end marker packet to the target node via the uplink forwarding tunnel;
• and
• if the node is the target node, buffer packets associated with the QoS flow received from the UE after establishment of the uplink forwarding tunnel until the GTP-U end marker packet is received from the target node via the uplink forwarding tunnel and, in response, send the buffered packets to a 5G core network.