The Internet of Things is the latest rising star in the information and communications technology industry. It embodies the vision of connecting virtually anything with everything and builds on a global growth of the overall number of connected devices. To support, and perhaps further boost, this growth the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards development organization has in its Release 13 developed three new technologies known as Extended Coverage GSM Internet of Things (EC-GSM-IoT), LTE for Machine-Type Communications (LTE-M), and Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) dedicated to providing cellular services to a massive number of IoT devices.
This book sets out to introduce, characterize, and, when relevant, in detail describe these three new technologies, defining a new concept known as the Cellular Internet of Things. To start with, Chapter 1 introduces the overall content of the book. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the accomplishments of 3GPP in the field of Machine-Type Communications until Release 13. Chapters 3, 5, and 7 describe the design objectives as well as the technical foundations of EC-GSM-IoT, LTE-M, and NB-IoT. Both physical layer details and idle and connected mode procedures are presented.
Chapters 4, 6, and 8 go through the performance objectives of the three technologies and present extensive evaluation results in terms of coverage, throughput, latency, battery lifetime, system capacity, and device complexity. The details behind each of these performance objectives including the methodologies for evaluating them are presented.
Chapter 9 summarizes the findings of the earlier chapters and describes the merits of the three technologies and provides a comparison between them. The chapter also introduces a set of solutions for short- and long-range communications operating in unlicensed frequency bands. The advantages of licensed operation over unlicensed operation are highlighted.
Finally, Chapter 10 gives a glance of how the Cellular Internet of Things fits into the vision of the fifth generation (5G) wireless communication system.
