Investigation on Link Adaptation for LTE-based Machine Type Communication

Coverage enhancement and low complexity are quite important aspects to support and broaden the application of machine type communication (MTC) in long term evolution (LTE). Repeating the same data across multiple subframes is widely considered as basic solution to improve the coverage. Low complexity target is mainly achieved by reducing the supported bandwidth and restricting the data processing size. Repetitions can be regarded as a new dimension of link adaptation besides the modulation and coding scheme (MCS) selection and the low complexity features are new factors impacting the link adaption as well. However, existing link adaptation mechanism in LTE system is unable to support such two-dimension link adaptation. Straightforward method suffers serious spectral efficiency loss and more power consumption and there is little other research on this issue, either. To save power and improve the spectral efficiency when performing the link adaptation for MTC, a smart method of coordinating the MCS selection and the repetition level determination with the consideration of new low complexity features is proposed in this paper. Extensive link level simulations are carried out to verify the effectiveness of proposed method. Simulation results show that proposed method could improve the spectral efficiency by around 42.1% and reduce the power consumption by around 36.8%.