The Internet of things is a network that implements interconnection and interworking between a person and a thing, or between different things (Machine to Machine, M2M for short). The prior art provides a cost-efficient machine type communication (Machine Type Communication, MTC for short) terminal (User Equipment, UE for short) based on Long Term Evolution (Long Term Evolution, LTE), and the terminal is applicable to the Internet of things.
The maximum system bandwidth which the LTE system can support is 20 MHz, and an ordinary LTE terminal can receive and send data on the entire carrier. However, the MTC terminal can receive and send data within a small bandwidth (narrowband), which reduces the downlink data processing capacity and data storage of the MTC terminal and saves costs. In this case, the MTC terminal needs to know the narrowband resource (such as a narrowband frequency resource and/or time resource) available to the terminal on the broadband carrier beforehand so that the MTC terminal needs only to obtain and store data on the narrowband resource predetermined for the terminal. In the prior art, a network-side device (such as a base station) notifies the available narrowband resource to the MTC terminal by using radio resource control (Radio Resource Control, RRC for short) signaling. Before the MTC terminal can receive the RRC signaling, the MTC terminal and the network-side device (such as a base station) cannot negotiate the narrowband resource available to the MTC terminal, and the MTC terminal cannot communicate with the network-side device (such as a base station) by using the narrowband resource.