An Experimental Study on Coverage Enhancement of LTE Cat-M1 for Machine-Type Communication

This paper studies coverage enhancement of LTE Cat-M1 devices from an experimental perspective. We first conduct link-level lab experiments on Cat-M1 modules using an RF test system and show the coverage gain as well as link throughput versus different repetition numbers. From these measurement results, we observe significant coverage gain resulting from the repetition mechanism, at the expense of a lower throughput. To mitigate the reduction in throughput, we further propose adaptive repetition algorithms to achieve higher throughput while maintaining the same coverage. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms achieve significantly higher throughput than the fixed-repetition approach.