Extended LTE Coverage For Indoor Machine Type Communication

Abstract: The interest of Machine Type Communication (MTC) is increasing and is expected to play an important role in the future network society. In the process of increasing the number of connected devices, the coverage plays an important role. This thesis work aims to study the possibility of supporting coverage limited MTC-devices within LTE by extending the LTE coverage. It shows that coverage increase by means of repetition is a good candidate, which allows for a significant increase without hardware upgrades at a low cost in terms of radio resources. For inter-site distances up to 2500 m, the proposed repetition scheme with an increase of 20 dB allows for almost complete coverage where today’s LTE have significant lack of coverage. It also shows that even though the increased coverage implies higher resource usage, the limitation is not in the number of users supported, but rather the coverage at longer inter-site distances.