Generic Energy Evaluation Methodology for Machine Type Communication

It is commonly accepted that the 3rd Generation Public Partnership Long Term Evolution standard is likely to be unfit for future large scale machine type communication (MMTC). As a result, a new standard, LTE Narrow-Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) and several radio protocol proposals are being developed. One of the main performance indicators for MMTC is the radio energy consumption. It is important to be able to evaluate the energy consumption of the new standard and the proposed protocols, therefore a generic energy consumption evaluation methodology tailored for MMTC devices is required. Such methodology is the contribution of this paper. It is developed by defining a generic radio transmission and describing the factors which affect the energy consumption. Special attention is put on the factors; power control, link-level performance and a radio power model with a non-constant power amplifier (PA) efficiency model intended for MMTC devices. The results show the impact of the factors and highlight first that applying a commonly used constant radio PA efficiency model can result in an overestimation of the battery life of up to 100% depending on the traffic scenario. It is also highlighted that combining power control, transmit repetitions and the radio power model opens for new methods to minimize the radio energy consumption.