METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR MANAGING MACHINE TYPE COMMUNICATION DEVICES IN AN ACCESS NETWORK

A wireless communication device, WCD (12), is associated with multiple Machine Type Communication (MTC) applications (14), each application (14) corresponding to a respective MTC Service Provider (SP) network (16) that identifies it using a corresponding "external identifier". The involved MTC SP networks (16) use the same common identifier to request a wireless communication network, WCN (18), used to access the WCD (12) to undertake certain configuration actions with respect to the WCD (12). The WCD (12) may belong to a group of WCDs (12), in which case the common identifier is an external group identifier. The WCN (18) advantageously determines which MTC SP network (16) is the "requesting provider" for a given requested configuration action, and it restricts the configuration action within the WCN (18) to the requesting provider.