The present document specifies the procedures used at the radio interface (Reference Point Um, see TS 24.002) for Radio Resource management. The Radio Resource Control Protocol (RRC) is specified. RRC is the Radio Resource control plane protocol for Radio Resource management that is used when a mobile station is operating in Iu mode. Notation "Reserved sub-clause number" is used to indicate which sub-clauses of the specification were moved from this part of the standard to the other part when this standard was split between RAN and CN parts. When the notations for "further study" or "FS" or "FFS" are present in this specification they mean that the indicated text is not a normative portion of this standard. These procedures are defined in terms of messages exchanged over the control channels of the radio interface. The control channels are described in TS 44.003. The structured functions and procedures of this protocol and the relationship with other layers and entities are described in general terms in TS 24.007.

The procedures currently described in the present document are for radio resource management for circuit switched and GPRS services. 3GPP TS 24.010 contains functional procedures for support of supplementary services. 3GPP TS 24.011 contains functional procedures for support of point-to-point short message services. 3GPP TS 44.012 contains functional description of short message cell broadcast. 3GPP TS 44.060 contains procedures for radio link control and medium access control (RLC/MAC) of packet data physical channels. 3GPP TS 44.071 contains functional descriptions and procedures for support of location services. 3GPP TS 24.008 contains the procedures for CN protocols.

The layer 3 procedures apply to the interface structures defined in TS 44.003. They use the functions and services provided by layer 2 defined in TS 44.005 and TS 44.006. TS 24.007 gives the general description of layer 3 including procedures, messages format and error handling.

A building block method is used to describe the layer 3 procedures. The basic building blocks are "elementary procedures" provided by the protocol control entities of the three sublayers, i.e. radio resource management, mobility management and connection management sublayer. Complete layer 3 transactions consist of specific sequences of elementary procedures. The term "structured procedure" is used for these sequences.

Test procedures of the GSM radio interface signalling are described in TS 51.010-1 and 3GPP TS 51.02x series.