Embodiments of the present invention disclose a data transmission method, including: acquiring data of a small data packet service; performing encoding processing on the data in a predefined encoding processing manner, where the predefined encoding processing manner is different from an encoding processing manner of a physical downlink control channel or an enhanced physical downlink control channel; mapping the data after the encoding processing to a small data packet physical channel; transmitting the data to a user terminal over the small data packet physical channel; where the small data packet physical channel includes: any channel of the physical downlink control channel, the enhanced physical downlink control channel, and a preset small data packet physical downlink control channel.