LTE IoT link budget and coverage performance in practical deployments

摘要

This paper provides an updated analysis of link-budget and coverage performance for LTE IoT technologies: enhancements for machine type communications (eMTC) and narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT). Previous studies have used the 3GPP evaluations assumptions and have demonstrated the coverage capabilities of these technologies when they are independently deployed. Some operators are, however, likely to deploy dual-mode networks - eMTC and NB-IoT - with the intent of supporting different applications in the two systems. With all conditions being equal for the two systems in such a scenario, comparison of the eMTC and NB-IoT technologies then requires that all assumptions are aligned. This paper extends the previous studies with the assumptions aligned for eMTC and NB-IoT systems to provide a fair coverage performance comparison. The study shows that compared to the 3GPP assumption, under the aligned assumptions, both eMTC and NB-IoT can support up to 5dB and 3dB higher uplink coverage, respectively. We further show these link budget improvements yield significantly reduced LTE IoT coverage outage in two simulated scenarios based on real network deployments: a wide area rural case and an urban deep indoor case. The results further demonstrate the potential of these LTE IoT technologies in realistic network deployment conditions.