December 2, 2016

With news reports out this week, that the 3GPP standard is set to be in 35% of low power wide area (LPWA) network connections by 2020, our Working Group RAN3 Chairman - Philippe Reininger - has given a timely presentation at the IoT Business & Technologies Congress (November 30, in Singapore), outlining the latest progress made on specifications for the IoT market.

3GPP now has what he described as a 'portfolio of technologies' that 3GPP operators can use to address market needs. The presentation helps to explain and summarise the major features - eMTC, NB-IOT and EC-GSM-IoT - completed in 3GPP Release 13.

However, the main part of the presentation covered the enhancements that will be published in Release-14, which is due for completion by June 2017.

eMTC enhancements (aka. LTE Cat M1);

• Support for positioning
• Support for Multicast
• Mobility for inter-frequency measurements
• Higher data rates
• Support for VoLTE

NB-IOT enhancements;

• Agreement on NB-IOT positioning
• Support for Multicast
• Power consumption and latency reduction
• Non- Anchor PRB enhancements
• Mobility and service continuity enhancements
• New Power Class(es)

See also, Enhanced DRX for NB-IOT and eMTC.

EC-GSM-IoT enhancements

• Various radio interface enhancements

Further reading:

• Philippe Reininger, RAN3 Chairman's presentation is on-line...here.
• IoT Standards Part II: 3GPP Standards, by Sami TABBANE (ITU training, 2018)
• www.telecompaper.com article "3GPP tech to account for 35% of LPWA connections by 2020" (December 1, 2016).

Contact for this article: Kevin FLYNN, Marketing and Communications Officer, 3GPP