Abstract
Nowadays, the design of 5G wireless network should consider the Internet of Things (IoT) among the main orientations. The emerging IoT applications need new requirements other than throughput to support a massive deployment of devices for massive machine-type communication (mMTC). Therefore, more importance is accorded to coverage, latency, power consumption and connection density. To this purpose, the third generation partnership project (3GPP) has introduced two novel cellular IoT technologies enabling mMTC, known as NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT) and enhanced MTC (eMTC). This paper provides an overview of NB-IoT and eMTC technologies and a complete performance evaluation of these technologies against the 5G mMTC requirements is presented. The performance evaluation results show that these requirements can be met but under certain conditions regarding the system configuration and deployment. At the end, a comparative analysis of the performance of both technologies is conducted mainly to determine the limits and suitable use cases of each technology.