Briefly, in accordance with one or more embodiments, a mechanism disclosed herein groups transmissions to machine-to-machine (M2M) devices in the downlink which can significantly reduce the overhead of transmission. One or more bursts to be transmitted in the downlink to one or more respective devices are aggregated and concatenated into a concatenated burst comprising one or more sub-bursts corresponding to the one or more bursts. The concatenated burst is encoded as a single payload to be transmitted, and the payload is transmitted to the one or more devices such that the devices are capable of decoding their respective sub-bursts in the concatenated burst.