Yufei Blankenship

An overview of 3GPP enhancements on machine to machine communications

The broad connection of devices to the Internet, known as the IoT or M2M, requires lowcost power-efficient global connectivity services. New physical layer solutions, MAC procedures, and network architectures are needed to evolve the current LTE cellular systems to meet the demands of IoT services. Several steps have been taken under the 3GPP to accomplish these objectives and are included in the upcoming 3GPP LTE standards release (3GPP Release 13). In this tutorial article, we present an overview of several features included in 3GPP to accommodate the needs of M2M communications, including changes in the physical layer such as enhanced machine type communications, and new MAC and higher-layer procedures provided by extended discontinuous reception. We also briefly discuss the narrowband IoT, which is in the development stage with a target completion date of June 2016.

Baseline performance of LTE positioning in 3GPP 3D MIMO indoor user scenarios

Positioning in currently deployed LTE networks is made via a combination of enhanced cell identity (E-CID), observed time difference of arrival (OTDOA) and global navigation satellite system (A-GNSS) information. Both simulations and field trials indicate acceptable performance for outdoor users. However, today the majority of the connections to cellular networks are established from terminals located indoors. This paper provides baseline positioning performance results based on the 3GPP 3D MIMO deployment and propagation model that has been adopted in the 3GPP Release (Rel.) 13 study item on indoor positioning enhancements. Horizontal and vertical accuracies are investigated for both outdoor-only and outdoor-indoor network deployments.

Reducing the Modem Complexity and Achieving Deep Coverage in LTE for Machine-Type Communications

The Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as one of the focal points in the evolution of cellular networks, and has motivated the introduction of several features that facilitate Machine-Type Communications (MTC) in LTE networks. These features serve the MTC goals of reduced User Equipment (UE) modem cost and complexity, Coverage Enhancement (CE) to support UEs in remote radio locations, and an improved battery lifetime. In this paper, we discuss the features specified in LTE Release 12 and Release 13 for reducing the UE modem cost up to 81% compared to the least expensive broadband LTE UE modem. Further, we describe the techniques specified in Release 13 for the CE of physical channels that carry data or control information. We provide link-level simulation results for the CE performance over various physical channels in terms of their error rates and per-user throughput.