A current mobile communication system may have more than one operator in a certain country or district, the operators are distinguished from each other through an operator identifier public land mobile network (Public Land Mobile Network, PLMN). The operator identifier PLMN includes two portions, i.e., a mobile country code (Mobile Country Code, MCC, with a length of 3 bits) and a mobile network code (Mobile Network Code, MNC, with a length of 2-3 bits). In a mobile communication system, PLMN is generally sent to a user terminal in a system message through broadcast, for the user terminal to select and access. At the user terminal side, a subscriber identity module (Subscriber Identity Module, SIM) card is configured to store the PLMN of the operator of the user, the PLMN is configured for the user to identify and access a wireless network.
Further, under a condition that a plurality of operators is available, for a same district, different operators will build a large number of wireless communication infrastructures (e.g., base station antennas) of their own. As a result, many infrastructures may be redundant, for example, at a same site, all operators may have their own base station facilities, thereby increasing operating cost. Moreover, if an unlicensed frequency band can be used for communication, then different operators need to conduct communication in the unlicensed frequency band, under such circumstances, there is a problem that the signals from different operators may interfe re with each other.
At present, network sharing is an important method to solve the problem of redundant wireless communication infrastructures, its main concept lies in that, when multiple operators (e.g. Operator A, Operator B and Operator C shown in FIG. 1) are maintaining their own core network, they can share an access-side network device, FIG. 1 is a schematic view of a network structure for network sharing according to the prior art. The access-side network device includes, but is not limited to, NodeB, radio network controller (Radio Network Controller, RNC), evolved NodeB (eNodeB) etc.
However, it should be noted that, in the current mobile communication system, considering the processing capacity and complexity of hardware at a user terminal, the same access-side network device only supports sharing of at most 6 operators at a certain cell frequency point. Therefore, the PLMN list included in the system message at a certain cell has a maximum length of 6. However, with more and more operator licenses being issued, and more and more Internet content providers being anticipated in mobile Internet, there is increasing needs on network sharing. As a result, for a cell frequency point, there may be more than 6 operators having needs on sharing of network nodes, if only the manner provided by the prior art is adopted, that is, selecting from the PLMN list a PLMN identifier matching with the PLMN preset in the terminal, then the communication of an operator not in the list will be affected seriously.
That is to say, limited by the conventional solution, if more operators have needs on network sharing, it is necessary to increase the number of PLMN broadcast in the system message, or increasing the number of working frequency points of the access-side device supporting network sharing. However, for the first manner, the technical standards of the current mobile communication system shall be modified, which also has higher requirements on hardware of the user terminal and increases complexity. For the second manner, if there is a small number of user terminals but a large number of operators, still more frequency resources need to be occupied, and more network devices need to be used, which leads to a waste of frequency resources and energy. In other words, in the prior art, with the increasing number of virtual operators, the current PLMN reporting manner will be constrained in many aspects, resulting in technical problem of limitation of operation on PLMN reporting, and there is no effective solution provided yet.