  Massive machine type communications (mMTC) is one of the cornerstone services
that have to be supported by 5G systems. 3GPP has already introduced LTE-M and
NB-IoT, often referred to as cellular IoT, in 3GPP Releases 13, 14, and 15 and
submitted these technologies as part of 3GPP IMT-2020 (i.e., 5G) technology
submission to ITU-R. Even though NB-IoT and LTE-M have shown to satisfy 5G mMTC
requirements defined by ITU-R, it is expected that these cellular IoT solutions
will not address all aspects of IoT and ongoing digitalization, including the
support for direct communication between "things" with flexible deployments,
different business models, as well as support for even higher node densities
and enhanced coverage. In this paper, we introduce the DECT-2020 standard
recently published by ETSI for mMTC communications. We evaluate its performance
and compare it to the existing LPWAN solutions showing that it outperforms
those in terms of supported density of nodes while still keeping delay and loss
guarantees at the required level.
