DECT-2020 New Radio: The Next Step Towards 5G Massive Machine-Type Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces the DECT-2020 standard for massive machine-type communications in 5G, demonstrating its superior performance over existing LPWAN solutions in supporting higher node densities with reliable delay and loss guarantees.

Contribution

It presents the DECT-2020 standard for mMTC, evaluates its performance, and compares it favorably to existing LPWAN solutions, highlighting its potential for 5G IoT applications.

Findings

DECT-2020 outperforms LPWAN solutions in node density support

DECT-2020 maintains delay and loss guarantees

DECT-2020 is suitable for 5G massive IoT deployments

Abstract

Massive machine type communications (mMTC) is one of the cornerstone services that have to be supported by 5G systems. 3GPP has already introduced LTE-M and NB-IoT, often referred to as cellular IoT, in 3GPP Releases 13, 14, and 15 and submitted these technologies as part of 3GPP IMT-2020 (i.e., 5G) technology submission to ITU-R. Even though NB-IoT and LTE-M have shown to satisfy 5G mMTC requirements defined by ITU-R, it is expected that these cellular IoT solutions will not address all aspects of IoT and ongoing digitalization, including the support for direct communication between "things" with flexible deployments, different business models, as well as support for even higher node densities and enhanced coverage. In this paper, we introduce the DECT-2020 standard recently published by ETSI for mMTC communications. We evaluate its performance and compare it to the existing LPWAN solutions showing that it outperforms those in terms of supported density of nodes while still keeping delay and loss guarantees at the required level.