Communications terminal and method

摘要

A communications terminal communicates data packets to or from a mobile communications network via a radio access interface. The mobile communications network comprises a radio network part including a plurality of base stations for communicating data packets to or from the mobile communications terminals via the radio access interface, and a core network part which is configured to communicate the data packets to destination addresses from the radio network part or to communicate the data packets to the radio network part from source addresses. The mobile communications network being configured to establish one or more communications bearers for communicating the data packets to or from the communications terminal via the radio network part and the core network part, each of the one or more communications bearers being established using context information associated with one or more connections from the communications terminal to the destination addresses, or to the communications terminal from source addresses. The communications terminal is configured to attach to one of the base stations of the mobile communications network, and when in an idle state, to communicate a short message data packet to the base station of the radio network part as a signalling message, the short message data packet including an indication of context information for use by the mobile communications network for communicating the short message data packet. A short message data packet can therefore be communicated (e.g. from a machine type communications (MTC) terminal) in a context-less or quasi-context-less manner without a communications bearer being established thereby reducing an amount of signalling overhead required, which can be an efficient way of communicating relatively small amounts of data.