The Internet of Things will bring about billions of
connected devices. In the cellular space, machine type
communications using LTE is under consideration by many
operators. LTE, however, was designed to provide broadband
high-speed data service with very low latency. Machine type
communications, on the other hand, have a different set of
requirements, namely low-rate, low-overhead, low-powerconsumption,
and low-cost. To address these requirements and
also to minimize impact from machine traffic to human traffic,
3GPP has been working on numerous LTE features such as
power saving, overload control, signaling reduction, complexity
reduction, and coverage enhancement. This paper will provide
an overview of LTE enhancements for machine type
communications. The paper will also present LTE capacity
analysis for machine traffic as well as the battery life of the
devices.