Method, apparatus and computer program for communicating

摘要

At a radio link control (RLC) layer (520) only device discovery information (522) is compiled into a first protocol data unit PDU (532) associated with a first radio bearer that is established for device discovery, and service discovery information (526) is compiled into at least a second PDU (536) associated with a second radio bearer. At a medium access control MAC layer (530) the first PDU (532) is prioritised over the second PDU (536). In one embodiment the MAC layer (530) sets priority of the first bearer to infinity before giving the available resources to the RLC layer (520) to ensure that the device discovery gets resources allocated in the RLC layer (520). Prioritising device discovery information in the RLC layer reduces signal processing effort required and so preserves device battery power. The invention has particular benefit in ad-hoc device-to-device (D2D) communications networks (such as machine-to-machine (M2M)).