In recent years, IoT has attracted much attention in the wireless communication world. More 'things' are expected to be interconnected for improving productivity efficiency and increasing comforts of life. Further reduction of size, complexity, and power consumption of IoT devices can enable the deployment of tens or even hundreds of billions of IoT devices for various applications and provide added value across the entire value chain. It is impossible to power all the IoT devices by battery that needs to be replaced or recharged manually, which leads to high maintenance cost, serious environmental issues, and even safety hazards for some use cases, for example, wireless sensors in electrical power, and petroleum industries. Most of the existing wireless communication devices are powered by batteries that need to be replaced or recharged manually. The automation and digitization of various industries opens numerous new markets requiring new IoT technologies of supporting batteryless devices with no energy storage capability or devices with energy storage that do not need to be replaced or recharged manually. An example type of application is asset identification, which presently has to resort mainly to barcodes and RFID in most industries. The main advantage of these two technologies is the ultra-low complexity and small form factor of the tags. However, the limited reading range of a few meters usually requires handheld scanning which leads to labor intensive and time-consuming operations, or RFID portals/gates which leads to costly deployments. Moreover, the lack of interference management scheme results in severe interference between RFID readers and capacity problems, especially in case of dense deployment. It is hard to support a large-scale network with seamless coverage for RFID. In contrast, this study investigates the feasibility of a new IoT technology to open new markets within 3GPP systems, whose number of connections and/or device density can be orders of magnitude higher than existing 3GPP IoT technologies, and which can provide complexity and power consumption orders-of-magnitude lower than existing 3GPP LPWA technologies such as NB-IoT and LTE-MTC.

The present document reports on the feasibility of meeting the design targets for relevant use cases of a new 3GPP IoT technology, on the basis of suitable deployment scenarios in a 3GPP system, which relies on ultra-low complexity devices with ultra-low power consumption for very-low end IoT applications. It intends to provide a clear differentiation, i.e. addressing use cases and scenarios that cannot otherwise be fulfilled based on existing 3GPP LPWA IoT technology. In terms of energy storage, the study considers the following device characteristics:

• Pure batteryless devices with no energy storage capability at all, and completely dependent on the availability of an external source of energy.
• Devices with limited energy storage capability that do not need to be replaced or recharged manually.

The following documents contain provisions which, through reference in this text, constitute provisions of the present document.

• References are either specific (identified by date of publication, edition number, version number, etc.) or non-specific.
• For a specific reference, subsequent revisions do not apply.
• For a non-specific reference, the latest version applies. In the case of a reference to a 3GPP document (including a GSM document), a non-specific reference implicitly refers to the latest version of that document in the same Release as the present document.