Internet of Things (IoT) supports wireless devices to operate with low power in wide range of area by implementing enhanced Machine Type Communication (eMTC) and Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT) features. The objective of eMTC is to provide variable data rate transmission and full-to-limited mobility. The goal of NB-IoT is to support reduced power consumption as well as low cost devices for delay-tolerant and low-throughput applications.
Reduced Complexity
IoT feature reduces the LTE operation complexity by limiting unnecessary functionalities and thereby enables implementation of low-cost modules, optimized for transmission of small and infrequent data.
Longer Battery Life
The objective with IoT is to support devices with long battery life up to about 10 years. The Power Save Mode (PSM) for IoT devices eliminates paging the device and thereby reduces the need to monitor the paging by the IoT devices. The IoT devices wake up only at the time of data transmission for mobile-originated services, such as environmental sensing and metering. Extended Discontinuous Reception (eDRX) enables IoT devices to stay asleep for extended time duration for mobile-terminated services, such as smart grids.
Extended Coverage Support
Repetitive transmission of the same information extends the signaling coverage and provides reliability of services for the IoT devices located in far-away distances or behind obstacles. Further coverage enhancement is achieved by relaxed timing requirements and low-order modulation.
Flexible Deployment
Narrow band carrier technology of NB-IoT enables utilization of single resource block, within a normal LTE carrier, as well as remnant spectrums such as unused resource blocks within a LTE carrier’s guard band and stand-alone carriers of re-farming spectrum used by GERAN.
