Internet of Things for Architects

LTE Cat-M1 (eMTC)

Cat-M1, also known as enhanced Machine-Type Communication (and sometimes just called Cat-M), was designed to target IoT and M2M use cases with low cost, low power, and range enhancements. Cat-M1 was released in the 3GPP release 13 schedule. The design is an optimized version of the Cat-0 architecture. The single largest difference is that the channel bandwidth is reduced from 20 MHz to 1.4 MHz. Reducing the channel bandwidth from a hardware point of view relaxes timing constraints, power, and circuitry. Costs are also reduced by up to 33% compared to Cat-0 since the circuitry doesn't need to manage a wide 20 Mhz spectrum. The other significant change is in the transmit power, which is reduced from 23 dB to 20 dB. Reducing ...