The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is standardizing a first release of a Long Term Evolution (LTE) concept. An LTE system or network may include a number of base stations (also referred to as “Node Bs”) connected to one or more mobility management entities/serving gateways (MME/S-GWs). A number of nodes (e.g., a network management system (NMS) node, an operation and support system (OSS) node, etc.) may provide operation and maintenance functionality for the base stations and/or the MME/S-GWs. In LTE, a downlink is based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), while an uplink is based on a single carrier modulation method known as discrete Fourier transform spread OFDM (DFT-S-OFDM). During initial access, user equipment (UE) (e.g., a wireless telephone, personal digital assistant (PDA), etc.) seeks access to a network (e.g., a radio network) in order to register and commence services. A LTE random access (RA) procedure serves as an uplink control procedure to enable the UE to access the LTE network.
The LTE network may provide access to a variety of other networks, such as the Internet, Internet Protocol (IP) Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) networks, the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), etc. In the LTE standard, when the user equipment is powered on it automatically attaches to the LTE network (i.e., the base stations, MME/S-GWs, etc.) even if there is no activity (e.g., a request for a service, a communication, etc.) from a user of the user equipment. Such unnecessary LTE network connectivity consumes and wastes resources associated with the LTE network.