What is URA and URA_PCH state?

 What is URA and URA_PCH state?

URA or UTRAN Registration Area is a colection of cells that are used for fast moving UE's in Connected mode when they are not transferring any data. In this case the UE is in CELL_PCH state. Everytime a fast moving UE in CELL_PCH state changes the cell, a CELL UPDATE needs to be performed to let the UTRAN know of the new position of the UE. This is done because in the connected mode (CELL_PCH), UE is known at cell level rather than UTRAN level as in IDLE state. If too many CELL UPDATES are performed, it defeats the purpose of UE being in CELL_PCH. Hence in this case the UE is put in URA_PCH state. Now the UE will perform CELL UPDATE only when the URA is changed for a UE. The drawback is that when UE needs to be paged the paging area is now extended to many cells belonging to the URA.

Also Note that the CELL_PCH state is actually a subset of the URA_PCH state. It is possible to define overlapping URAs to be used in the URA_PCH state. Thus, the UTRAN operator could define that each cell is a separate URA in addition to other larger URAs. Then the operator could assign small one-cell URAs for slow-moving mobiles, and larger URAs for mobiles with greater mobility. The small URAs could nicely perform the task of the CELL_PCH state. However, it has been decided to keep these states separate. 

The URAs can be overlapping or even hierarchical. The same cell may belong to several different URAs, and the UEs in that cell may have been registered to different URAs. SIB 2 contains a list of URA identities indicating which URAs this cell belongs to. This arrangement is done to further reduce the amount of location update signaling because now the UEs moving back and forth in the boundary area of two URAs do not have to update their URA location information if the boundary cells do belong to both URAs.