  The fifth generation (5G) wireless technology is primarily designed to
address a wide range of use cases categorized into the enhanced mobile
broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable and low latency communication (URLLC), and
massive machine-type communication (mMTC). Nevertheless, there are a few other
use cases which are in-between these main use cases such as industrial wireless
sensor networks, video surveillance, or wearables. In order to efficiently
serve such use cases, in Release 17, the 3rd generation partnership project
(3GPP) introduced the reduced capability NR devices (NR-RedCap) with lower cost
and complexity, smaller form factor and longer battery life compared to regular
NR devices. However, one key potential consequence of device cost and
complexity reduction is the coverage loss. In this paper, we provide a
comprehensive evaluation of NR RedCap coverage for different physical channels
and initial access messages to identify the channels/messages that are
potentially coverage limiting for RedCap UEs. We perform the coverage
evaluations for RedCap UEs operating in three different scenarios, namely
Rural, Urban and Indoor with carrier frequencies 700 MHz, 2.6 GHz and 28 GHz,
respectively. Our results confirm that for all the considered scenarios, the
amounts of required coverage recovery for RedCap channels are either less than
1 dB or can be compensated by considering smaller data rate targets for RedCap
use cases.
