DECT-2020 New Radio: The Next Step toward 5G Massive Machine-Type Communications

Massive machine type communications (mMTC) is one of the cornerstone services that must be supported by 5G systems. 3GPP has already introduced LTE-M and NB-IoT, referred to as cellular IoT (CIoT), in 3GPP Releases 13, 14, and 15, and submitted these technologies as part of 3GPP's IMT-2020 technology submission to ITU-R. Even though NB-IoT and LTE-M have been shown to satisfy 5G mMTC requirements, it is expected that these CIoT solutions will not address all aspects of IoT and ongoing digitalization, including the support for direct communication between “things” with flexible deployments, different business models, as well as support for even higher node densities and enhanced coverage. In this article, we first describe the Digital Enhanced Cordless Tele-communications (DECT) DECT-2020 standard recently published by ETSI for mMTC communications. We then evaluate its performance and compare it to the existing low-power wide area network solutions, showing that it outperforms those in terms of supported density of nodes while keeping delay and loss guarantees at the required level.