A new physical downlink control channel design for MTC in LTE-advanced

Coverage enhancement is important to support and broaden the application of the machine type communication( MTC) in long term evolution (LTE). Coverage enhancement for physical downlink control channel(PDCCH) is one key issue. A new compact PDCCH for MTC was widely proposed to provide coverage enhancement gain. However, due to the inclusion of cyclic redundancy check(CRC) sequence, the coverage enhancement gain provided by compact PDCCH is restricted. To overcome this bottleneck, a smart CRC processing on the top of compact PDCCH is investigated to facilitate the coverage enhancement in this paper. Theoretical analysis and link level simulation is performed to verify the effectiveness. It is observed that the coverage enhancement gain could be improved by 13.8 % with the proposed CRC processing manner. Besides, another benefit brought by proposed CRC handling is largely reducing the false alarm risk.