dtch such as small amounts of uplink packet data the uplink cpch carries dedicated packet based user data dtch or dedicated control information dcch it supports uplink inner loop power control pc with the aid of a downlink dedicated physical control channel dpcch its transmission may span several radio frames and it is mapped onto the physical common packet channel pcpch embodiments of the present invention are described hereinbelow with particular reference to the random access channel however this is for illustrative purposes only and the present invention is not limited in its applicability to the rach the slot structure of the prach message is illustrated in fig2 it consists of two parts a data part 200 where the rach transport channel is mapped and a control part 202 where the layer 1 control information is carried the data 200 and control 202 parts are transmitted in parallel the spreading factors of the data part are 256 128 64 and 32 the control part consists of a set of pilot bits 204 u2032 and a set of transport format combination indicator tfci bits 206 and has a spreading factor of 256 the tfci transport format combination indicator field indicates the tf transport format of the rach mapped to the data part of the radio frame and it is repeated in the second radio frame if the message part lasts for 20 ms the tf defines the bit rate channel coding tti etc these concepts are described in 3gpp ts 25 302 each cell of the radio access network is configured by radio network planning rnp a cell is associated with a node b a u201c cell u201d is defined by a cell identification c id configuration generation id timing delay t_cell utra absolute radio frequency channel.