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While trying to get a better understanding of VoLTE and IMS , I came across bearers stuff which
I thought might be useful to share with you guys. Before we talk about what default and
dedicated bearer is, let's understand what bearer itself is :
Bearer is just a virtual concept. It defines how the UE data is treated when it travels across the
network. Network might treat some data in a special way and treat others normally. Some flow of
data might be provided guaranteed bit rate while other may face low transfer. In short, bearer is
a set of network parameter that defines data specific treatment e.g. Person A will always get at
least 256 Kbps download speed on his LTE phone while for person B there is no guaranteed bit
rate and might face extremely bad download speed at times
Now let me talk briefly about Dedicated and Default bearer one by one.
When LTE UE attaches to the network for the first time, it will be assigned default bearer which
remains as long as UE is attached. Default bearer is best effort service. Each default bearer
comes with an IP address. UE can have additional default bearers as well. Each default bearer
will have a separate IP address. QCI 5 to 9 (Non- GBR) can be assigned to default bearer.
Dedicated Bearer
To put it simple, dedicated bearers provides dedicated tunnel to one or more specific traffic (i.e.
VoIP, video etc). Dedicated bearer acts as an additional bearer on top of default bearer. It does
not require separate IP address due to the fact that only additional default bearer needs an IP
address and therefore dedicated bearer is always linked to one of the default bearer established
previously. Dedicated bearer can be GBR or non-GBR (whereas default bearer can only be non-
GBR). For services like VoLTE we need to provide better user experience and this is where
Dedicated bearer would come handy. Dedicated bearer uses Traffic flow templates (TFT) to give
special treatment to specific services
Example
Usually LTE networks with VoLTE implementations has two default and one dedicated bearer
Default bearer 1: Used for signaling messages (sip signaling) related to IMS network. It uses qci
5
Dedicated bearer: Used for VoLTE VoIP traffic. It uses qci 1 and is linked to default bearer 1
Default bearer 2: Used for all other smartphone traffic (video, chat, email, browser etc)
Please also visit Quality of Service (QoS) in LTE to get more better understanding on bearers
and QoS