An information element, sometimes informally referred to as a field, is an item in

Q.931 ITU-T Recommendation Q.931 is the ITU standard ISDN connection control signalling protocol, forming part of ''Digital Subscriber Signalling System No. 1''. Unlike connectionless systems like UDP, ISDN is connection oriented and uses explicit sign ...

and Q.2931 messages,

IEEE 802.11 IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of media access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer commun ...

management frames, and cellular network messages sent between a

base transceiver station A base transceiver station (BTS) is a piece of equipment that facilitates wireless communication between user equipment (UE) and a network. UEs are devices like mobile phones (handsets), WLL phones, computers with wireless Internet connectivity, ...

and a mobile phone or similar piece of

user equipment In the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) and 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE), user equipment (UE) is any device used directly by an end-user to communicate. It can be a hand-held telephone, a laptop computer equipped with a mobile bro ...

.3GPP Technical Specification 24.007 as published by ETSI
Section 11.2.1 An information element is often a

type–length–value Within communication protocols, TLV (type-length-value or tag-length-value) is an encoding scheme used for optional informational elements in a certain protocol. A TLV-encoded data stream contains code related to the record type, the record val ...

item, containing 1) a type (which corresponds to the label of a field), a length indicator, and a value, although any combination of one or more of those parts is possible. A single message may contain multiple information elements. The abbreviation IE is found in many technical specification documents from 3GPP. It is not uncommon for a single specification document to contain thousands of references to IEs.

References

{{reflist Telecommunications

See also

References