Massive IoT Radio Access Network

Ericsson Massive IoT delivers Cat-M (a.k.a.” LTE-M”) and NB-IoT access technologies, supporting battery optimization, extreme coverage and Ericsson unique long cell range solutions.

Cat-M, and NB-IoT are the 3GPP IoT technologies for operation in licensed spectrum and were first defined in 3GPP release 13. These 3GPP access technologies are all capable of supporting massive cellular IoT use cases requiring 15-20 dB extended coverage as compared to today’s baselines for GSM and LTE, as well as 10+ years battery lifetimes at low device cost.

The technology choice depends on the operator network evolution plans and current coverage, as well as a selection of primary use cases. Cat-M and NB-IoT are complementary and broaden the range of available access technologies to enable massive IoT use cases requiring high coverage, very long battery live or high energy efficiency, and low complexity devices in high volumes to be deployed.

In all three cases, the Ericsson offering enables extensive reuse of site assets such as radio and modern baseband units, as well as pooling of computational resources. The solution is designed to support efficient coexistence of MBB and IoT traffic. Both, Cat-M and NB-IoT can be deployed co-existent with Ericsson Spectrum Sharing (ESS) and are considered “5G Technologies” since 3GPP Release 15.

The Ericsson Massive IoT RAN solution in combination with the IoT core network portfolio enables separation of resources for MBB and IoT as well as the flexibility and scalability needed for the predicted growth of IoT.