On the Physical Layer Design for Low Cost Machine Type Communication in 3GPP LTE

This paper brings to light the reasoning and principles shaping the standardization direction in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) regarding provision of low complexity Machine Type Communication (MTC), via Long Term Evolution (LTE) of 3GPP. It elaborates 3GPP´s approaches and suggestions towards addressing the physical layer challenges and discusses solutions 3GPP proposed specifically in relation to the low complexity operation of MTC devices and the coverage extension of current cellular networks to challenging scenarios of MTC. Results of comprehensive set of simulations are presented to assess the impact of repetition coding and power boosting on the physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH). In addition, novel ideas are presented to reduce the complexity of channel estimation, one of the most computation intensive blocks in the baseband receive chain. These results all leap towards finding the physical layer design for low cost MTC devices via 3GPP LTE.