RNTI- RADIO NETWORK

TEMPORARY IDENTIFIER
-- DEFINITION AND TYPES

By- Sona Gava

Dt- 5/10/2016
RNTI- Radio Network Temporary
Identifier.
• A Radio Network Temporary Identifier is a generic term of an identifier for a UE when an
RRC connection exists.
• Getting more specifically into LTE, this RNTI is used to identify one specific radio
channel from other radio channel and one user from another user. As you may recall,
WCDMA has a RNTI concept which is carried as part of MAC header to differentiate one
user to another while in communication state. and it used special channelization code to
differentiate one radio channel from the other.

• Putting it very simply, you can think of RNTI as a kind of UE ID for the traffic
between UE and eNB lower layer. But it would be more accurate to think of it as
'UE ID + Channel ID' since each type of channel has its own range of RNTI value
 Types of RNTI in LTE
Following are the brief summary of RNTIs being used in LTE.
• P-RNTI : It stands for Paging RNTI. Used for Paging Message.
• SI-RNTI : It stands for System Information RNTI. Used for transmission of SIB
messages
• RA-RNTI : It stands for Random Access RNTI. Used for PRACH Response.
• C-RNTI : It stands for Cell RNTI. Used for the transmission to a specific UE after
RACH.
• T-CRNTI : It stands for Temporary C-RNTI. Mainly used during RACH
• SPS-C-RNTI : It stands for Semi persistance Scheduling C-RNTI
• TPC-PUCCH-RNTI : It stands for Transmit Power Control-Physical Uplink Control
Channel-RNTI
• TPC-PUSCH-RNTI : It stands for Transmit Power Control-Physical Uplink Shared
Channel-RNTI
• M-RNTI : It stands for MBMS RNTI
Who issues these RNTI ?
NETWORK issues RNTI to UE.
 What does RNTI do for each of these Radio Channel??

The detailed process differs with the types of RNTIs, but generally speaking all of these,
RNTI is used to scramble the CRC part of the radio channel messages. It implies that if UE
does not know the exact RNTI values for each of the cases, it cannot decode the radio
channel messages even though the message reaches the UE intact.

 How/Who determines each types of RNTI ?

RA-RNTI : UE determines RA-RNTI as explained in here in the RACH page.

T-CRNTI : Network allocate T-CRNTI via RAR as shown in here in the RACH page.
C-RNTI : T-CRNTI becomes C-RNTI once Contention Resolution gets passed.
RNTI Value Range
• Following table shows the range of values which is allocated for each RNTI types.
The Types of RNTIs and it's usage