receiving, by a terminal, a notification message sent by a primary base station, where the notification message includes a serial number of a random access preamble code and a serial number of a physical random access channel mask code;
sending, by the terminal, a random access request message to a secondary base station by using a sending resource that is determined according to the serial number of the physical random access channel mask code, where the random access request message includes the random access preamble code that is determined according to the serial number of the random access preamble code;
receiving, by the terminal, a random access response message sent by the secondary base station, where the random access response message includes a time advance command TAC that is determined by the secondary base station according to the random access request message; and
adjusting, by the terminal according to the TAC, time advance TA of the terminal on a secondary serving cell corresponding to the secondary base station.
Further, the notification message is a reconfiguration message or a random access resource allocation message; when the notification message is a random access resource allocation message, the terminal further receives a reconfiguration message sent by the primary base station; and correspondingly, the reconfiguration message further includes a random access response window size, of the secondary serving cell, that is used by the terminal to receive the random access response message.