Content for TS 52.008 Word version: 18.0.0

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0 Introduction p. 6

The present document is part of a TS-family covering the 3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group Services and System Aspects; Telecommunication management, as identified below:

32.421:

Subscriber and equipment trace: Trace concepts and requirements

32.422:

Subscriber and equipment trace: Trace control and configuration management

32.423:

Subscriber and equipment trace: Trace data definition and management

52.008:

GSM subscriber and equipment trace

The trace facility enables customer administration and network management to trace the activities of various entities when specific events occur within the PLMN. This facility should also enable the tracing of all the information that is available to the PLMN concerning the call path used by the associated entity. Examples of information that could be in a trace record are:

the identity of the originating and terminating equipment of the mobile or fixed subscriber;
the identity of the incoming and outgoing circuits of the nodes involved;
supplementary Services invoked;
all A-Interface messages.

The trace facility is a useful maintenance aid and development tool, which can be used during system testing and proving. In particular it may be used in conjunction with test-MSs to ascertain the digital cell "footprint", the network integrity and also the network QOS as perceived by the PLMN customers.

The facility may be used by subscriber administration and network management for subscriber observation, e.g. following a customer complaint or on suspicion of equipment malfunction by the operator or at the request of the police.

As the amount of information that can be collected for a single call is very large, Network Elements can limit the number of simultaneous traces by either rejecting a trace request or by only producing a sub-set of the information required

1 Scope p. 7

The present document specifies the Trace facility for GSM where it refers to:

subscriber tracing (tracing of International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI));
equipment tracing (tracing of International Mobile station Equipment Identity (IMEI)).

It does not cover:

types of trace which relate more to network elements than to individual subscribers e.g. tracing events within a Base Station System (BSS), and so on;
tracing of all possible parties in e.g. a multi-party call, (although multiple calls related to the IMSI specified in the trace type field are traceable).

It also refers only to tracing activated from the OSF and not to that activated by means of local Man Machine Interface (MMI).