ff must be made between increasing Rmax value and the increased UE energy consump- tion since the UE receiver needs to be active and monitor NPDCCH subframes for a longer time duration. The beginning of the period may be shifted with respect to t=0 using the off- set parameter a. The number of subframes by which the period is shifted is denoted by aT. Fig. 6.15 shows how different a values can be used to create non-overlapping NPDCCH con- figurations for three UEs having the same value of period T=16. Note that the term non- overlapping means that the non-gap intervals of the UEs do not overlap with each other. As shown in the figure, the NPDCCH periods of UE-2 and UE-3 start two and six subframes Internet of Things Transport block CRC 16 Transport block + CRC TBCC (NPDSCH)/ TC(NPUSCH) Encoded bits Rate matching Rate-matched bits 3GPP TS 36.213 Table Space frequency block code (SFBC) 16.4.1.3-1 3 GPP TS 36.213 Table 16.4.1.5.1-1 (TX diversity) Antenna port 1 Antenna port 0 011110000100110 111000010101100 One resource unit Different scrambling code One cycle NsF=3 NPBCHINPDCCH NPDSCH NPDSCH NPDSCH NPBCH Figure 6.16 NPDSCH processing and mapping procedure [25]. later, respectively, compared to that of UE-1. It must be noted that, in an overlapping configu- ration, if any of the UEs receive one or more NPDCCH subframes, it may partially or fully block the non-gap interval of the remaining UEs, thus blocking the scheduling opportunity of those UEs. Furthermore, the likelihood of this blocking increases with larger Rmax values [4]. 6.3.7 Narrowband Physical Downlink Shared Channel The NPDSCH is the traffic channel and carries SIBs, upper layer data, and RAR messages. The NPDSCH subframe has the same structure as the NPDCCH shown in Fig. 6.16. It starts at a configurable OFDM symbol lNPDCCHstart and is mapped around the NRS and LTE CRS during in-band operation, where the value of parameterl, NPDCCHstart is provided signal- ing for the in-band operation, and is zero otherwise. A maximum TBS of 680 bits is specified for 