Massive machine type communication (mMTC) to serve billions of IoT devices is considered to offer the potential to open a potential new market for the next generation cellular network. Legacy cellular networks cannot meet the requirements of emerging mMTC applications, since they were designed for human-driven services. In order to provide support for mMTC services, current research and standardization work focuses on the improvement and adaptation of legacy networks. However, these solutions face challenges to enhance the service availability and improve the battery life of mMTC devices simultaneously. In this article, we propose to exploit a network controlled sidelink communication scheme to enable cellular networks with better support for mMTC services. Moreover, a context-aware algorithm is applied to ensure the efficiency of the proposed scheme and multiple context information of devices are taken into account. Correspondingly, signaling schemes are also designed and illustrated in this work to facilitate the proposed technology. The signaling schemes enable the network to collect required context information with light signaling effort and thus the network can derive a smart configuration for both the sidelink and cellular link. In order to demonstrate the improvements brought by our scheme, a system-level simulator is implemented and numerical results show that our scheme can simultaneously enhance both the service availability and battery life of sensors.