The goal of facilitating the growing data-centric behaviors of global society has led to new classifications of wireless communications. One of these new classifications defined in the 3GPP Release 13 is massive machine-type communications (mMTC). A new wireless technology, known as narrow-band Internet of things (NB-IoT) was created to enable communication between large numbers of autonomous\/semi-autonomous devices. This new standard required a physical layer redesign, resource allocation optimization, and innovation in radio technologies to better suit large numbers of low-power distributed devices that may be running on batteries. There are also other wireless standards designed for wireless networking of IoT devices, including LTE-M, Thread, Cat M, and LoRa (all low power wide area network technologies).<\/p>\n
Due to the nature of some mMTC communications, other wireless network performance factors, or key performance indicators (KPI), are also vital, these include reliability, latency, efficiency, scalability, cost, and configurability. The result of this new standard is the expectation that such systems will eventually be able to support a device density of one million IoT devices per square kilometer. These devices could be anything from a remote data logger to a wireless industrial control network.<\/p>\n