Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC)

1.1 Introduction
The internet of things (IoT) is one of the latest rising star in the information and communication
technology (ICT) industry and embodies the vision of connecting virtually anything to everything.
Cisco estimates that 12 billion devices will be connected by 2020, while Ericsson goes even further
in its vision, stating that there will be 18 billion devices connected in 2022. In comparison, currently
there is only 7.3 billion mobile cellular subscriptions.

The increase of the number of connected devices will mainly come from several applications which
are yet to be connected. Traditional use cases such as connecting utility meters to support e.g.
distribution and billing. Another use cases such as wearables are also gaining momentum with
increasing market traction being realized.

This exponential growth on the cellular IoT (CIoT) is (and will keep be) supported and driven by
work performed by the third-generation partnership project (3GPP). The three new technologies
offered by 3GPP are the enhanced coverage global system for mobile communications for IoT
applications (EC-GSM-IoT), Narrow band IoT (NB-IoT), and the LTE for machine type
communications (LTE-M). It is also worth noting that except for these solutions, a system so called
low power wide area network (LPWAN) is also exist. This technology is, in general, the extension
of the wireless personal area network (WPAN, such as Bluetooth) and the wireless local area
network (WLAN, such as Wi-Fi) which use the unlicensed spectrum. Compared to the WLAN and
WPAN, however, the focus on the WPAN is on the coverage and the power consumption. The
challenge on this solution, in certain, comes from the reliability (e.g. from the scheduling and the
interference point of views). Nevertheless, this article will be focused on the LTE-M Technology.

The introduction of IoT, in certain, will diverse the set of requirements placed on the mobile
communications technology. In the throughput aspect, for example, IoT applications will most
likely be more relaxed compared to that of smart phone. On the other hand, the possibility that
the devices for IoT might be placed in the deep indoors, e.g. basement, might increase the
requirement of IoT applications in terms of coverage. In addition, as the IoT applications mostly
involves low-cost devices in the user side, the power consumption should also less than that of for
smart phone.

1.2 Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC) Requirements

From the applications and requirements point of view, the IoT market is often said to be divided
into at least two categories, i.e., mMTC and URLLC. Smart wearables and sensor networks are
perhaps the most probable applications for the mMTC services. Considering its low-cost and
battery-dependent characteristics, the possible location of the devices, and the number of devices
potentially using this application, mMTC will put its focus on the coverage and the energy
efficiency.

URLLC can, on the other hand, be exemplified by high-end applications such as automated-driving,
industrial applications, and eHealth. These applications, therefore, will put the emphasize on the
reliability and latency. Different requirements on the mMTC, URLLC, and mobile broadband
applications can be seen in Fig. 1. More specifically, the target requirement for the mMTC can be
seen in Table 1.
 Latency

Mobility Throughput

Connections Coverage

Battery Complexity

Items Requirement Description

Coverage 164 dB The maximum coupling loss (MCL) systems was required to
surpass GPRS coverage by 20 dB. The GPRS coverage
reference was estimated to be equal to 144 dB.
Throughput 160 bps It is required that the candidate technologies should support
a data rate of at least 160 bps at the coverage limit.
Latency 10 s mMTC is expected to provide delay tolerant services. To
guarantee high-alert reporting, however, a latency
requirement of 10 s was set for high-priority reports.
Capacity 60,000 Capacity supporting 40 connected devices per household
device/km2 with roughly 1500 households/km2 was required.
Power efficiency 10 years/5Wh To secure operation regardless of the access to a main
power source, it is expected that a 5-watt-hour (Wh) battery
would last for at least 10 years.
Complexity Ultra-low device An ultra-low device complexity was required to support
complexity mass production and deployment of ultra-low cost devices.
 LTE for Machine Type Communications (LTE-M)

1. Background

LTE-M, in general, extends LTE features for improved support for machine type communications
(MTC). Several work items that had been carried out is as follows:

a. Release 12: work time of low cost and enhanced coverage MTC user equipment (UE) for LTE,
which sometimes referred to as the MTC work item. In this work item, the device Cat-0 is being
introduced.
b. Release 13: work item of LTE physical layer enhancements for MTC, which sometimes referred
to as the eMTC work item. In this work item, the device Cat-M1 and the coverage enhancement
(CE) modes A and B are being introduced.
c. Release 14: work item of further enhanced MTC for LTE, which sometimes referred to as the
feMTC. In this work item, the device Cat-M2 and various improvements are being introduced.

The Cat-0, Cat-M1, and Cat-M3 are the user devices categories in LTE which, in general, are based on
the characteristic of the devices itself (e.g. throughput, complexity, etc). This categorization is
beneficial, especially so that the BTS (eNodeB, eNB) can communicate effectively with all users
connected to it. The downlink and uplink throughput of each category can be written as in below table:

Parameters Categories
Cat- Cat- 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
M2 M1
Downlink data rate (Mbps) 1 10 50 100 150 300 300 300 1200
Uplink data rate (Mbps) 1 5 25 50 50 75 50 150 600

Specifically, for LTE-M, the characteristic of Cat-0, Cat-M1, and Cat-M2 are as follow
Parameters Categories
Cat-M2 Cat-M1 0
Peak Downlink data rate 1 Mbps
Peak Uplink data rate 1 Mbps
Max number of downlink spatial layers 1
Number of UE RF chains 1
Duplex mode Full and half duplex
UE receive bandwidth 1,4 MHz 20 MHz
Maximum UE transmit power 20 dBm (15 dBm plan) 23 dBm

2. Design principles

To support the MTC application, the LTE-M has to comply following design principles

2.1. Low device complexity and cost

To reduce the complexity and cost, following techniques are considered as the most promising:

a. Reduce the peak rate

b. Implementing single receive antenna only
c. Half duplex operation
d. Bandwidth reduction
e. Maximum transmit power reduction
 Using this cost reduction technique, it is expected that the cost for the Cat-0 modem, for example,
will be half of the cost of Cat-1 modem. By lowering the cost even further, the cost of Cat-M1
modem is expected to be as low as the enhanced GPRS modem.

2.2 Coverage enhancement

The coverage enhancement is required because several IoT devices will be on the relatively challenging
coverage condition, e.g. in the basement, etc. Using the fact that MTC applications have relax
requirement on the data rates and latency, the coverage improvement can be obtained by

a. Repetition
a. CE Mode A: 32 subframes repetitions
b. CE Mode B: 2048 subframes repetitions
b. Retransmission

2.3 Long battery lifetime

To prolong the battery lifetime, several techniques can be applied, such as

a. Power saving mode (PSM) in LTE release 12 and extended Discontinuous Transmission
(eDRX) in LTE release 13.
b. Bandwidth reduction

2.4 Support a large number of devices

This design principle has been started in the release 10 and 11 with techniques such as:

a. Access Class Baring (ACB) and overload control (need to check again in Section 2.2.1 of the
book)
b. Radio resource control suspend/resume mechanism (need to check again in Section 2.2.2 of
the book).

2.5 Deployment flexibility

LTE-M uses the same carrier frequency as its conventional LTE counterpart. Therefore, the deployment
should also enable a dynamic sharing between those. Thus, the LTE-M should use the similar design
with the LTE. As an example, LTE-M will use the same bandwidth (1.4, 3, 5, 10, 15, and 20 MHz),
implementing the same transmission technique, i.e., orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) in the downlink and single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) in the uplink,
same channel raster, subcarrier spacing, cyclic prefix (CP) length, resource grid, frame structure, etc.

3. Physical Layer

3. 1. Physical Layer Numerology

LTE-M reuses the LTE’s primary synchronization signal (PSS), secondary synchronization signal (SSS)
and the core part of the physical broadcast channel (PBCH) carrying the master information block
(MIB). These physical signals are located in the center of LTE system bandwidth and this center
frequency is aligned with a channel raster of 100 kHz. In addition, these physical channels and signals
are transmitted within six physical resource blocks (PRBs).

One PRB spans 12 subcarriers, each with 15 kHz subcarrier spacings, correspond to 180 kHz. The
smallest resource unit that can be scheduled to a device is one PRB pair mapped over two slots, which
thus, equal to 12 subcarriers over 14 OFDM symbols (if normal CP is being used). The physical resource
block of LTE (and LTE-M) can be seen in figure 3.

1 Resource
element
1 PRB (180 kHz)

1 Subcarrier (15 kHz)

Frequency

Slot (0.5 ms) 1 OFDM Symbol

Subframe (1 ms)
Time

In a bigger point of view, the overall time frame structure can be seen in Figure 4. On the highest level,
one hyperframe cycle has 1024 hyperframes, which is equal to 2 hours, 54 minutes, and 46 seconds.
Each of this hyperframe is equal to 10,24 seconds and is divided into 1024 frames. Each frame has a
length of 10 ms which is divided equally into 10 subframes. In each subframe, there are two slots with
the length of 0.5 ms each. In addition, each slot is divided into 7 OFDM symbols in case of normal CP
and 6 OFDM symbols in case of extended CP. The normal CP is designed to support propagation
condition with a delay spread up to 4.7 μs, while the extended CP is intended to support deployments
where the maximum delay spread is 16,7 μs.

-- Need to add the explanation about channel raster, PSS, SSS, PBCH, and MIB.
 One hyperframe cycle (2 hours, 54 minutes, 46 seconds)

Hyperframe 0 Hyperframe 1 Hyperframe 1023

(10,24 s) (10,24 s) (10,24 s)

Frame 0 Frame 1 Frame 2 Frame 1023

(10 ms) (10 ms) (10 ms) (10 ms)

Subframe 0 Subframe 1 Subframe 2 Subframe 9

(1 ms) (1 ms) (1 ms) (1 ms)

Slot 0 Slot 0
(0.5 ms) (0.5 ms)

3. Transmission Scheme

As mentioned above, the DL and UL transmission schemes for the LTE-M are the same with that of LTE.
This means, LTE-M uses OFDM for the downlink and SC-FDMA for the uplink, with a carrier spacing of
15 kHz. In addition, the LTE-M supports both frequency division duplexing (FDD) and time division
duplexing (TDD). Furthermore, for the case of FDD, it supports both Full Duplex FDD (FD-FDD) and Half
Duplex FDD (HD-FDD). The differences between these schemes can be seen in Table 3.

Duplex Modes Description

FDD Two different carrier frequencies are used for DL and UL
FD-FDD Reception and transmission can be conducted at the same time
HD-FDD Switch back between reception and transmission is required
HD-FDD type A The switch between reception and transmission is fast, and requires two
different oscillators at the user terminal
HD-FDD type B Guard subframes between UL and DL, and between DL and UL are
required. However, only one oscillator is required at the user terminal
TDD Different time slots are used for DL and UL at the same frequency carrier.
The switching between the UL and DL is conducted spontaneously, while
the transition from the DL to the UL employs a special subframe. The
location of DL, UL, and special (S) subframe can be different, depends on
the configurations. Different configurations can be seen in Table 4.

UL-DL Subframe number

Configuration 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
0 DL S UL UL UL DL S UL UL UL
1 DL S UL UL DL DL S UL UL DL
2 DL S UL DL DL DL S UL DL DL
3 DL S UL UL UL DL DL DL DL DL
4 DL S UL UL DL DL DL DL DL DL
 5 DL S UL DL DL DL DL DL DL DL
6 DL S UL UL UL DL S UL UL DL

LTE support different system bandwidths, i.e., 1.4, 3, 5, 10, 15, and 20 Mhz. It is worth noting that this
bandwidth already consists of guard band, which is about 10% of the total bandwidth. The maximum
bandwidth that can be scheduled, therefore, is equal to 18 MHz which corresponds to 100 PRBs. LTE
devices support the transmission and reception spanning the full system bandwidth (e.g. 6 PRBs for
1.4 MHz, 15 PRBs for 3 MHz, 25 PRBs for 5 MHz, 50 PRBs for 10 MHz, 75 PRBs for 15 MHz, and 100
PRBs for 20 MHz).

LTE-M, on the other hand, uses low-cost devices that support a reduced bandwidth of transmission
and reception. It has been agreed in the LTE-M standard that the resource allocation in LTE-M is based
on the non-overlapping narrowband in size of 6 PRBs. It is worth noting that not all supported PRBs in
LTE can be divided into 6. For the case of odd PRBs available, the center PRB will not be used in the
transmission. In addition, if there is remaining PRBs which are not used in the transmission, they will
be evenly distributed in the edges of system bandwidth. The number of narrowband uses in the
transmission for each system bandwidth, and the unused PRBs can be seen in Table 5.
System bandwidth Total number of
Number of possible PRBs not belonging to any
including guard PRBs in system
narrowband narrowband
bands bandwidth
1.4 MHz 6 1 None
3 MHz 15 2 3 (1 on each edge, 1 on the center)
5 MHz 25 4 1 (1 at the center)
10 MHz 50 8 2 (1 on each edge)
15 MHz 75 12 3 (1 on each edge, 1 on the center)
20 MHz 100 16 4 (2 on each edge)