Performance of Low-Cost LTE Devices for Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Machine type communications (MTC) is defined as data communication among devices without the need for human interaction. With the decommissioning of legacy cellular systems, migration of MTC devices to LTE is under investigation by many operators. It is desirable that the cost of LTE MTC devices is similar to that of existing GSM devices. Several cost reduction techniques have been studied. This paper summarizes cost reduction techniques for MTC devices and examines system impacts from such devices being introduced in LTE. Performance is evaluated for the Advanced Metering Infrastructure used in smart grid. It is seen that LTE offers significant capacity for smart metering even with low-cost devices. For a system with 10 MHz bandwidth, approximately 2% of the system resource is required to support AMI in an urban deployment scenario.