LTE-M

Planning

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Content

• Narrowband Allocation • Network Readiness for LTE-M

• PCI Planning • Impact upon Legacy LTE
• Cell Range Planning
• MPRACH Planning • Product Restrictions
• MPUCCH Allocation • Feature Compatibility
• Link Budget • Hardware
• Power Boosting • Link Budget and
Dimensioning
• Cell Identity & BTS Identity
• SW compatibility
• Tracking Area
• Licensing
• Neighbours
• Core Network
Dependencies
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Narrowband Allocation

Mobile Access

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Narrowbands (I)
• LTE-M UE transmit and receive within 6 PRB belonging to a ‘Narrowband’
• A Narrowband is defined as 6 adjacent PRB in the frequency domain
• The number of Narrowbands within each channel bandwidth is shown below
• Narrowbands are centered around the middle of the channel bandwidth
• If the channel bandwidth has an odd number of PRB then the central PRB does not
belong to a Narrowband

1.4 MHz 3 MHz 5 MHz 10 MHz 15 MHz 20 MHz

Total PRB 6 15 25 50 75 100
Number of Narrowbands 1 2 4 8 12 16

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Narrowbands (II)
• The Narrowbands belonging to the 3, 5 and 10 MHz channel bandwidths are shown
below:

3 MHz channel
Narrowband 0 Narrowband 1

5 MHz channel
Narrowband 0 Narrowband 1 Narrowband 2 Narrowband 3

10 MHz channel

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Downlink Narrowband (I)
• Within the timescales of FL17A, the position of
the downlink Narrowband is fixed
• LTE3128 allocates Narrowband 7 for the 10 MHz
channel bandwidth
• PRB 43 to 48
• LTE3582 allocates Narrowband 0 for the 5 MHz
channel bandwidth
• PRB 0 to 5

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Downlink Narrowband (II)

• The same downlink Narrowbands are used for

paging messages on the PDSCH

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Uplink Narrowband

• Within the timescales of FL17A, the position of

the uplink Narrowband is fixed
• LTE3128 allocates Narrowband 6 for the 10 MHz
channel bandwidth
• PRB 37 to 42
• LTE3582 allocates Narrowband 2 for the 5 MHz
channel bandwidth
• PRB 13 to 18

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PCI Planning

Mobile Access

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PCI Planning
• PCI planning is not necessary for LTE-M
• LTE-M shares the same PCI as the host cell

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Cell Range Planning

Mobile Access

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Cell Range Planning

• Cell Range is limited by:

• Timing Advance
• PRACH Preamble Format (cyclic prefix and guard period durations)
• PRACH Root Sequence Cyclic Shift

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Cell Range – Timing Advance

• Timing Advance is initialised using a command within

MSG2
• 11 bits are allocated to this command
• same as legacy LTE
• range from 0 to 1282 is multiplied by 16/30.72
microsecs
• generates maximum value of 0.67 ms
• Corresponds to a round trip distance of 200 km,
i.e. cell range of 100 km

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Cell Range – PRACH Preamble Format
• The PRACH Preamble Format is configured using the PRACH Configuration Index
• Within the timescale of FL17A, LTE-M shares the same PRACH Configuration Index as the
legacy LTE host cell

• LTE-M does not place any restrictions upon the

configuration of prachConfIndex
• Preamble Formats 0, 1 and 3 are supported
• Cell Range of up to 100 km

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Cell Range – PRACH Root Sequence Cyclic Shift
• Within the timescale of FL17A, LTE-M shares the same PRACH Root Sequence Cyclic Shift
as the legacy LTE host cell
• LTE-M does not place any restrictions upon the configuration of prachConfIndex

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Cell Range Planning - Summary

• If the existing legacy LTE Cell Range is sufficient for LTE-M, then no additional planning is
required for LTE-M
• If there is a requirement to increase the Cell Range for LTE-M then it must be increased for
both LTE-M and legacy LTE
• potential change of PRACH Format
• change of PRACH Root Sequence Cyclic Shift
• re-planning of PRACH Root Sequences

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MPRACH Planning

Mobile Access

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MPRACH Planning
• PRACH Planning for legacy LTE involves:
• selection of PRACH Preamble Format
Impact of LTE-M should at
• selection of PRACH Configuration Index
least be considered
• selection of PRACH Root Sequence Cyclic Shift
• Root Sequence allocation
Modified by LTE-M
• division of 64 preamble sequences into groups
• specification of PRACH frequency offset
• These tasks are common to both LTE-M and legacy LTE when LTE-M is enabled

• PRACH Planning for LTE-M adds:

• selection of period between the start of MPRACH opportunities

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Selection of PRACH Preamble Format
• It should be possible to keep the same PRACH Preamble Format when enabling LTE-M
• existing cell range should correspond to the existing site density
• any change to the PRACH Preamble Format will impact both LTE-M and legacy LTE
• The PRACH Preamble Format should be checked to gain an understanding of the maximum cell
range

Selection of PRACH Configuration Index

• Enabling LTE-M will increase the PRACH load for legacy LTE because a subset of preambles
will no longer be available to legacy LTE
• It may be necessary to compensate for the unavailable preambles by increasing the PRACH
Configuration Index to a higher capacity value

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Selection of PRACH Root Sequence Cyclic Shift
• It should be possible to keep the same PRACH Root Sequence Cyclic Shift when enabling
LTE-M
• existing cell range should correspond to the existing site density
• any change to the PRACH Root Sequence Cyclic Shift will impact both LTE-M and
legacy LTE
• The PRACH Root Sequence Cyclic Shift should be checked to gain an understanding of the
maximum cell range

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Division of 64 Preambles into Groups
• When enabling LTE-M, it is necessary to allocate a subset of
preambles to ‘Group C’
• reduces the preambles available to legacy LTE
• The number of preambles belonging to Group C is configured
using raPreGrCSizeCatM
• default of 15 preambles
• It is likely that the legacy values for raPreGrASize and
raNondedPreamb will need to be reconfigured when enabling
LTE-M

raPreGrASize
raNondedPreamb raPreGrCSizeCatM

Group A Group B Dedicated LTE-M

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64 Preambles
Period between MPRACH Opportunities (I)
• When enabling LTE-M, it is necessary to specify the period between the start of LTE-M
PRACH opportunities
• Configured using the prachStartSFCatM parameter (default value of 8)
• The period is quantified in terms of legacy LTE PRACH opportunities
• default value of 8 means that 1 in every 8 legacy LTE PRACH opportunities can be used
to initiate an LTE-M PRACH transmission

Defines the period

Radio frame 1 prach-ConfigIndex = 4 between attempts
Subframe 4 prach-StartingSubframe-r13 = 8
Radio frame 2
Radio frame 0 Subframe 4 numRepetitionPerPreambleAttempt-r13 = 2
Subframe 4

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Preamble
Transmission Period of 8 PRACH opportunities
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Transmission
Period between MPRACH Opportunities (II)
• The period between the start of LTE-M PRACH opportunities must allow for repetitions
• For example, if 8 repetitions are used for each MPRACH preamble transmission then the period
should be at least 8 PRACH opportunities

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MPUCCH Allocation

Mobile Access

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MPUCCH Allocation
• Used to transfer Scheduling Requests and HARQ Acknowledgements
• no CSI reporting on the MPUCCH
• Within the timescales of FL17A, a 2 PRB are allocated to the MPUCCH
• total PUCCH allocation must be increased by 2
• The total PUCCH allocation must be <= 14 PRB when using the 10 MHz channel to
avoid colliding with Narrowband 6

Legacy PUCCH Legacy PUCCH MPUCCH

Formats 2 & 3 Format 1, 1a, 1b Resources

SR ACK/NACK SR ACK/NACK

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Link Budget

Mobile Access

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Link Budget (I)
• Link budget principles for LTE-M are the same as for other technologies
• A key point is that the Noise Floor needs to be scaled according to the bandwidth of
the physical channel, i.e. based upon kTB
• k = Boltzmann’s constant = 1.38 ×10 -23 Downlink Scheduler allocates 6 PRB
• T = temperature = 290 K Uplink Scheduler allocates 2 or 6 PRB
• B = Bandwidth

PRB Allocation Bandwidth Noise Floor

2 360 kHz -118.4 dBm
6 1080 kHz -113.6 dBm

• Noise Figure needs to be added to these numbers

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Link Budget (II)
• Similar to other link budgets, SINR requirements are an important input
• generated from link level simulations
• service/channel specific

• Similar to other link budgets, greatest uncertainty is likely to be associated with

factors such as building penetration loss

• LTE-M link budget can include a ‘Handoff Gain’ although handover is not
supported in FL17A
• quantifies the cell edge benefit of being able to cell reselect onto the best cell
as fading conditions change the best server over time

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Link Budget (III)
• Important to differentiate between ‘Path Loss’ and ‘Coupling Loss’
• These terms are often mixed in documentation
• Path Loss is the air-interface propagation loss
• Coupling Loss is the total link loss between antenna connectors

• When a figure of 156 dB is quoted as a Maximum Coupling Loss (MCL)

coverage figure for LTE-M, this refers to the
Maximum Coupling Loss (MCL)

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Link Budget (IV)

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For internal use
Link Budget (V)

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For internal use
Power Boosting

Mobile Access

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 Power Boosting

• Within the timescales of FL17A, downlink power boosting is not supported for LTE-M

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For internal use
Cell Identity & BTS Identity

Mobile Access

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BTS Identity
• The LNBTS object is shared between legacy LTE and LTE-M, i.e. there is a common BTS
Identity and separate planning is not required

Cell Identity
• The LNCEL object is shared between legacy LTE and LTE-M, i.e. there is a common Local
Cell Resource Identity and separate planning is not required
• Cell Identities are planned using the Local Cell Resource Identity (lcrId)
• combined with the BTS Identity to generate eutraCelId

eutraCelId
lnBtsId lcrId
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Tracking Area Planning

Mobile Access

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Tracking Area Planning
• Tracking Area Codes (TAC) are shared between legacy LTE and LTE-M, i.e. separate
planning is not required
• The eNode B separates the legacy LTE and LTE-M paging records using the ‘Extended UE
Identity Index Value’
• legacy LTE pages are not broadcast over LTE-M, and vice versa

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Neighbours

Mobile Access

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Neighbour Planning

• Within the timescales of FL17A, LTE-M only supports Idle Mode mobility
• Neighbour definitions are not mandatory
• Neighbour Planning is not necessary

• Note that SIB4-BR (intra-frequency) allows the inclusion of specific neighbours for blacklisting
and the application of measurement power offsets
• can be optionally defined

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For internal use
Network Readiness for LTE-M

Mobile Access

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Impact upon Legacy LTE
• LTE-M allows dynamic sharing of Resource Blocks within the allocated Narrowband
between LTE-M and legacy LTE
• impact of LTE-M depends upon LTE-M activity factor (load)
• Also a dependence upon PBCH repetition and System Information broadcast rate
• The attached Excel allows impact to be quantified:

Microsoft Excel
Worksheet

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Product Restrictions 3GPP specification
LTE-M can be deployed in all LTE bandwidths (1.4 MHz, 3 MHz, 5 MHz, 10
Restrictions in LTE3128
10 MHz supported
MHz, 15 MHz, 20 MHz)

LTE-M can be deployed in all LTE frequency bands No restrictions, but only certain bands (band 13, 700 MHz) have been tested

• From a Ue perspective, most of

functionality specified by 3GPP Rel Can be deployed in FDD and TDD networks FDD supported

13 is mandatory. Both full duplex and half duplex transmission Half duplex supported

Multiple narrowbands can be defined One narrowband supported (DL: MPDCCH and PDSCH, UL: PUSCH)

CE modes A and B, 4 coverage levels, 15 dB coverage gain compared to legacy CE mode A, 1 coverage level, 5 – 10 dB gain
LTE

• However, this is not the case for No limitations in PRACH format PRACH format 0 supported (cell radius up to 14.5 km)

Network Idle and connected mode mobility Idle mode mobility supported
3 dB downlink power boost of LTE-M PRBs No power boost

Open loop and closed loop uplink power control Open loop uplink power control supported

• Nokia implementation is spread over Multiple data radio bearers, both GBR and non-GBR. Also SRB-only option. Only single data radio bearer, non-GBR, supported. SRB-only not supported

several releases ( some example are Up to 8 parallel HARQ processes Only 1 HARQ process supported. This means that maximum sustained downlink

given in the table*) throughput is 94 kbps and maximum sustained uplink throughput is 117 kbps (see
calculations below the table)

VoLTE No VoLTE support

SRS (Sounding Reference Signal) can be used SRS not supported

Dynamic link adaptation Dynamic link adaptation

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© Nokia 2017 *Source LTE-M planning engineering guideline, RAN aspects – Poul Larsen
Feature Compatibility [1] Features incompatible with LTE3128
LTE3071: NB-IoT
LTE1113: eICIC macro
LTE1496: eICIC micro
LTE1117: eMBMS
LTE48: High speed support
• LTE- M requires LTE 1130 Dynamic PUCCH LTE97: Cell radius max 77 km

Allocation LTE180: Cell radius max 100 km

LTE944: PUSCH masking
LTE1949: Extended power reduction range
LTE3242: A-MPR
• There are a number of legacy features which should LTE1382: Cell resource groups

not be enabled with LTE-M LTE786: PUCCH blanking

LTE2149: Supplemental downlink carrier

• Some example are given in the table*
LTE1800: Downlink interference shaping
LTE1059: Uplink multi-cluster scheduling
LTE1709: Liquid cell
LTE1987: Downlink adaptive closed loop SU MIMO
LTE2664: Load based PUCCH region
LTE2733: Baseband pooling
LTE1203: Load based power saving with Tx path switching off

LTE2445/LTE3268: Combined super cell

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Feature Compatibility [2]
Alternative view from Mint, to enable LTE-M:
• actCatM can only be configured to 'true' if all of the following conditions are fulfilled:
(1) in LNCEL_FDD:
- dlChBw and ulChBw must be set identical, allowed values are '10 MHz', ‘5 MHz’.
- prachConfIndex and prachCS configuration is supported in full compliance as legacy with existing consistency check.
- prachHsFlag must be set to 'false'
- actPuschMask must be set to 'false'
- blankedPucch must be smaller than or equal to 8 if dlChBw is set to ‘10MHz’
- blankedPucch must be set to 0 if dlChBw is set to ‘5MHz’
- selectOuterPuschRegion must be set to ‘None’
- actUlMultiCluster must be set to 'false'
- actLiquidCell must be set to 'false'
- actAutoPucchAlloc must be set to 'true'.
- dlMimoMode can only be set to 'SingleTX', 'TXDiv', 'Dynamic Open Loop MIMO', 'Closed Loop Mimo'
- actCombSuperCell must be set to 'false'
- prsConfigurationIndex must not be set to "14"

For example: LTE1709: Liquid cell, LTE1059: Uplink multi-cluster

scheduling - disabled
LTE1130 Dynamic PUCCH allocation - enabled
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Feature Compatibilty [3]

(2) in SIB-siWindowLen:
(2.1) If actEicic is set to 'false', siWindowLen must have a value greater than or equal to '20ms'.
(2.2) If actEicic is set to 'true', siWindowLen must be equal to '40ms’.

(3) in LNBTS_FDD:
- actDlIntShaping must be set to ‘false’
- actProSeComm must be set to 'false’

(4) In LNBTS/LNCEL/LNCEL_FDD/APUCCH_FDD
If actCatM is set to ‘true’, selectPrachRegion must be set to 'InnerLowerEdge’.

(5) in LNCEL:
- cellResourceSharingMode must be set to ‘none’
- If actEicic is set to ‘true’, cellType must be set to 'large’

If actCatM is set to 'true' all of the following conditions must be fulfilled:

- one instance of MOC CATMCEL must exist for the cell
- catMProfId must be configured

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Hardware Dimensioning
• The following hardware is required for LTE-M:
• FSMF, or
• Airscale

• The activation of LTE-M does not require additional LNCEL objects at the eNode B, i.e.
both legacy LTE and LTE-M share the same cells

• This means that hardware dimensioning is not impacted when evaluating the requirement for
Cell Sets

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Link Budget/Dimensioning
• The link budget and site density should be checked to ensure that the existing network grid
gives the coverage needed.

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SW Compatibilty
• There a no special compatibility requirement for LTE M (other than the compatibility
requirements of the LTE release supporting LTE-M IoT features)

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Licensing [1]
LTE-M will need a capacity licence:
• Based in the number of “messages” per day
• Message from licensing perspective is the number of successful release of RRC
connections

• Based on UE movement to ECM idle state (LTE-M) Counters (M8061C43-47)

• Capacity licenses are issued in steps of 1000 messages,

• first step covers 0 to 1000 messages per day, second 1001 to 2000 messages
per day and so on

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Licensing [2]
• One LTE-M message may require several RRC connections
• For example: if response is need from server, RRC inactivity timer is short, then
if inactivity expires before the server respond this will count a 2 message from
license point of view

NOTE:
a) Legacy LTE capacity license (number of RRC connections per eNB)
includes LTE-M connections
b) Depending on the commercial agreement with the operator, the LTE-M
license cost may depend on the number of LTE-M cells - partial deployment will save license
costs

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Core Network Dependencies [1]
• Core features are not Mandatory, road map for MME needs to be check.

• The core network features can be roughly divided into three classes
1. Those needed to enable certain LTE-M radio features
2. Those needed to enable certain 3GPP features, but which is not related to RAN
functionality
3. Enhancement to core network’s capability to handle/manage IoT traffic but is not
related to 3GPP or RAN functionality

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Core Network Dependencies [2]
Class Description Network element(s) Nokia feature
• Example of such features*
1 MME Support for EMM-REGISTERED eNB, MME, HSS MME: f11701-01
(Class column refers to previous slide) UE without a PDN Connection (so SRB-
only operation is possible)
1 Idle Mode eDRX eNB, MME, HSS MME: f11603-01
1 Cat-M Paging Enhancement: MME Support MME MME: m11604-01
for Coverage Enhancement Paging

2 Power Save Mode (to permit device to go to HSS, MME MME: m10923-01
deep sleep)
2 Extended Periodic TAU timer HSS, MME MME: m10241-01
2 UE backoff timer for overload control MME MME: m10709-02
3 GTP-C Load and Overload Control MME / SGW / PGW ?
3 Gx throttling PGW / GGSN ?
3 Diameter Overload Control PGW / GGSN ?
3 Service-based paging policy MME Various features
3 Gy throttling PGW / GGSN ?
3 Low Access Priority Device Support MME MME: m10115-01
3 Service-Based RRC Inactivity Control eNB, MME CMM 18.0 candidate

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