Analysis of the Impact of eMTC on Legacy LTE

Recently, eMTC(Enhanced Machine Type Communication), usually called LTE-M, another popular CIoT after NB-IoT, is also a low power wide area (LPWA) technology standard published by 3GPP in the Release 13 specification. Compared with NB-IoT, eMTC supports higher velocity, better mobility and more functionality(such as VoLTE, tracking device and objects etc. ). The eMTC equipment also has low complexity, low power consumption, wide network coverage and huge service capacity, which meets the IoT business requirements. The eMTC aims to coexist with LTE's spectrums, network and infrastructure etc. Both eMTC and LTE share the PRB resources, which may result in the impact of eMTC on legacy LTE. In this paper, we firstly give a theoretical analysis of the effect of eMTC on LTE. Then through our Lab test, we verify the effect of eMTC on LTE. Finally, based on the above analysis and verification, we propose a bandwidth requirement for LTE system, which should be considered as one of the important factors for the commercial deployment of eMTC network if switching on eMTC.