In the visionary future of Connected Life, it is foreseen that enhancements are needed to facilitate provisioning of all attributes necessary for providing the connectivity to the machine to machine UEs in the area of Health, Education, Automotive and Smart Cities. It is seen as important to provide an operator added value to connectivity services as well as ease of use for MTC subscribers. One particular aspect of the PS Domain connectivity in 3GPP system is that a correct APN is required to establish a PDN Connection. Solutions exist where a list of APNs for different MNOs is stored in the Mobile Equipment (ME), but this places a management overhead on either the ME supplier or current Home Operator to keep such list up-to-date in the ME. For a truly global MTC Module that would mean that it have to contain and maintain a list of over 1000 different APNs to satisfy all markets. Even to cover a local geographic region, such as Europe, several hundred different APNs would need to be preloaded and maintained. For MTC service the ME (i.e. telematics module) is often a very generic module whereas the machine to machine application is usually very specific and can often require the use of a specific dedicated APN. In the case of APN provided by the UE in PDN Connection establishment then the MNO may be forced to perform device management to the ME or perform SIM-OTA provisioning to the UICC. The correct APN to be used depends on the MNO subscription identified by the IMSI and thereby the USIM. The correct APN may also depend on the particular application unless a multiservice APN is used. APN may also be used to identify a MTC UE for the purpose of MTC roaming SLAs. Emergency APN is needed for emergency services but such APN is provided by the network when a UE is requesting an Emergency PDN connection.

The scope of this study is:

• to provide details about the use cases where there is a need of control of APNs;
• to identify potential new requirements to fulfil the use cases;
• to identify potential solutions to fulfil the use cases;

The scope of the study is focussed on Machine-To-Machine UEs but can take into account a more generic set of UEs. This study will identify what connectivity use-cases that are needed to be fulfilled, and study if multiple APN or a multi-purpose APN per subscription (IMSI) combined with other 3GPP specified features can support those connectivity use-cases. The study will also analyse the impacts in scenarios where the service provider decides to change the MNO.

The following documents contain provisions which, through reference in this text, constitute provisions of the present document.

• References are either specific (identified by date of publication, edition number, version number, etc.) or non-specific.
• For a specific reference, subsequent revisions do not apply.
• For a non-specific reference, the latest version applies. In the case of a reference to a 3GPP document (including a GSM document), a non-specific reference implicitly refers to the latest version of that document in the same Release as the present document.