The new enhancements in LTE-A Rel-13 for reliable machine type communications

Recent forecasts predict a huge increase in the number of wireless devices that will connect to the Internet through the Internet-of-Things (IoT) framework, which depends mainly on machine-to-machine communication (M2M) and machine type communication (MTC). The current wireless systems are adopting new changes to face the newly emerged challenges from MTC and IoT. The 3GPP standard for LTE-A recently included new categories of user equipment (UE) to support MTC. The new categories can provide low cost, low power, and extended coverage modes. In this paper, we present an overview of the new specifications of different physical channels of the LTE-A CAT-M in release 13 (Rel-13). We investigate the operation of the techniques used in the new specifications, modes of operation, and discuss some of the implementation challenges. We also propose and assess the performance of a low complexity channel estimation technique in low Doppler channels associated with the MTC applications.