Chapter 16
Machine Type Communication (MTC)
3GPP systems including the GERAN, the UTRAN, and the E-UTRAN support Machine Type Communication (MTC), which is also known as Machine-to-Machine communication (M2M). The 3GPP system provides services which are used for end-to-end communications between the MTC application on the external network and the MTC device that is a UE supporting MTC.
Several use cases for MTC were identified in [1, 2]. One of the use cases is smart metering. Metering devices could monitor electric power, gas, water, or heating to report information on energy consumption to service providers. Metering devices may autonomously report the information to the centralized node, or the centralized node may poll metering devices when reporting is needed. The reported information could be used to facilitate more efficient use of energy.
Another use case is road security. For instance, when a car accident occurs, an in-vehicle emergency call service could be initiated autonomously to report location information for the car accident to the emergency center. The reported information could be used to facilitate prompt assistance. MTC use cases for road security could include intelligent traffic management, automatic ticketing, fleet management, and so on.
Consumer electronics and devices such as eBook readers, digital cameras, personal computers, and navigation systems also form one of the potential use cases. Such devices could use MTC to upgrade firmware or to upload and ...
