In this report a traffic model for massive low-rate machine-to-machine communications is presented and used in an evaluation of LTE-MTC and LoRaWAN.

Outage and latency for both LTE-MTC and LoRaWAN are obtained through simulation and a tractable model for LoRaWAN is found through analysis. A transmission scheme in which transmissions occur in parallel by LTE-MTC and LoRAWAN is also analysed as is a scheme in which LoRaWAN is used to form capillary networks within an LTE-MTC cell.

LTE-MTC is found to provide a high capacity, low latency network capable of handling a high device density while LoRaWAN is found to provide a lower capacity, in general higher latencies and accommodate only low device densities. A trade-off must be made between cost and QoS requirements at the device-side to chose technology.