NB-IoT for 5G

This chapter illustrates that there are many challenging problems in the modern society such as environment pollution, radiation pollution, high demand, and low supply of energy. Such issues need modern solutions to tackle them. In this context, green internet of things (IoT) solutions have come up with flying colors. As there is a constant need of the energy by the interconnected IoT devices to perceive, fetch, and transmit the real-time information, the energy demands remain high. Green IoT is an emerging concept to meet this problem by framing the energy-efficient policies so as to provide a simpler yet better solution to enhance the quality of the current practices. In this chapter, different practical aspects of green IoT and narrowband IoT (NBIoT) deployment have been presented. NBIoT narrowband signals are used in low data rates are transmitted and have a widerange of reception because narrow filters cancel out unwanted wideband noise. NBIoT has several advantages over LTE-M due to lower device cost, longer battery life and extended coverage. Finally, some future research directions have been addressed.

This chapter covers the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) from different aspects. It focuses on 3GPP cellular IoT evolution for connectivity, that is, narrowband IoT (NB‐IoT). The chapter summarizes the IoT evolution from an end‐to‐end perspective, including the IoT platform, IoT protocols, connectivity, and the sensors layer. The IoT platform should support open standard protocols to communicate with different sensors, devices, and gateways from different vendors. The proposed IoT platform will support existing technologies including 2G/3G/LTE/Wi‐Fi/PLC/ Fixed and low‐power, wide‐area (LPWA) networks such as long‐range (LoRaWAN) and Sigfox as well as 3GPP standardized technologies such as LTE‐Machine‐Type Communications (MTC) and 3GPP NB‐IoT. The chapter shows link budgets for NB‐IoT with different subcarrier spacing. One machine‐to‐machine (M2M) is a global partnership developing standards for M2M communications, enabling large‐scale implementation of the IoT. The chapter addresses a high‐level architecture reference model, network elements, and reference point for cellular IoT (CIoT).

Internet of things (IoT) has become a pervasive technology with ubiquitous presence in the modern digital ecosystem. Several types of IoT are available in the recent years based on their features and applications. Narrowband IoT (NBIoT) is one of the 3GPP standardized solutions for massive machine type communications (mMTC). It is designed for the large scale mMTC to provide coverage over a large area. Therefore, NBIoT is one of the most attractive low power wide area (LPWA) technologies. It is preferred for the large scale deployments in the large projects such as smart farming, healthcare, smart cities and smart grids. However, it is also suitable for low power domestic applications such as smart home and pets’ tracking. The LPWA features of NBIoT make it the primary choice for several emerging applications such as healthcare, agriculture, utility management, tracking of objects, smart city monitoring, retail management, smart grid monitoring, and industry applications. In this article we provide the principles and applications of NBIoT for the large scale deployments.

The arrival of internet of things (IoT) is a new revolution in the information and communication technologies. It added several new dimensions to the new and existing platforms of ICTs. It has improved the quality of our modern living by several new and smart technologies and their value-added applications. Applying the new emerging technologies in emergency medical services could offer better services to human lives during the emergency conditions. This chapter provides an overview of utilizing the IoT in the field of emergency medicine. IoT has tremendous potential to transform how the healthcare providers interact with patients. In order to achieve this, the healthcare sectors need widespread adoption and implementation of IoT. Healthcare sector is huge when compared with other IoT-enabled sectors. Therefore, the widespread deployment of IoT needs an effective version of IoT which is economical and does not pose any risk to the patients. Both these criteria can be met by the lighter and simpler version of IoT known as narrowband IoT (NBIoT). It is suitable due to its low power wide area (LPWA) coverage capabilities. In this chapter, the authors review the network architectures, applications, and trends of NBIoT in the modern healthcare. They further discuss how different wearable devices with coordinated smart sensors can improve emergency monitoring of patients for improved services in out-hospital and in-hospital scenarios. Finally, they give an account of advantages and disadvantages NBIoT in the emergency medical applications.

With the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, the smart city paradigm has become a reality. Wireless low-power communication technologies (LPWAN) are widely used for device connection in smart homes, smart lighting, mitering, and so on. This work suggests a new approach to a smart parking solution using the benefits of narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) technology. NB-IoT is an LPWAN technology dedicated to sensor communication within 5G mobile networks. This paper proposes the integration of NB-IoT into the core IoT platform, enabling direct sensor data navigation to the IoT radio stations for processing, after which they are forwarded to the user application programming interface (API). Showcasing the results of our research and experiments, this work suggests the ability of NB-IoT technology to support geolocation and navigation services, as well as payment and reservation services for vehicle parking to make the smart parking solutions smarter.

Terrestrial Internet of Things (IoT) communication systems cannot provide worldwide coverage as effectively as satellite systems. Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) is currently one of the major terrestrial IoT technology. This article provides an evaluation of the NB-IoT physical layer performance in the context of two satellite scenarios: Geostationary (GEO) and Low Earth Orbit (LEO). GEO scenarios suffer from large distances between transmitter and receiver, while LEO systems exhibit very large levels of Doppler. New algorithms are proposed to reliably adapt NB-IoT in these contexts and performance in terms of maximum throughput is evaluated and compared. Finally, NB-IoT main limitations in satellite communication links are identified.

The recent standardization of 3GPP Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) paves the way to support low-power wide-area (LPWA) use cases in cellular networks. NB-IoT design goals are extended coverage, low power and low cost devices, and massive connections. As a new radio access technology, it is necessary to analyze the possibilities NB-IoT provides to support different traffic and coverage needs. In this paper, we propose and validate an NB-IoT energy consumption model. The analytical model is based on a Markov chain. For the validation, an experimental setup is used to measure the energy consumption of two commercial NB-IoT user equipments (UEs) connected to a base station emulator. The evaluation is done considering three test cases. The comparison of the model and measurements is done in terms of the estimated battery lifetime and the latency needed to finish the control plane procedure. The conducted evaluation shows the analytical model performs well, obtaining a maximum relative error of the battery lifetime estimation between the model and the measurements of 21% for an assumed interarrival time (IAT) of 6 min.

The designing process of an IoT (Internet of Things) network requires adequate knowledge of various communication technologies that make the connection of the IoT modules possible. Many important factors such as scalability, bandwidth, data rate (speed), coverage, power consumption, and security support need to be considered to answer the needs of an IoT application with regards to the implemented radio communication technology. This paper studies the choices of three major LPWAN (Low-Power Wide-Area Networks) technologies that are currently leading in the market of radio communication technologies. Focusing on Sigfox, LoRaWAN (Low-Range Wide-Area Networks), and NB-IoT (Narrow-Band Internet of Things), this work intends to give the respective pros and cons of the mentioned technologies and a clear view of the recent trends and effective choices of radio communication technologies for major smart IoT applications.

Internet of things (IoT) is a way of connecting everything around us together, which would be widely applied in the 5G era. Narrow band IoT (NB-IoT) is one of the solutions introduced from 3rd Generation Partner Project (3GPP) Release-13 to fulfill this concept. Massive-connection and narrow band operation are two key features of NB-IoT. With current NB-IoT design, certain resources within narrow band are dedicated for transmitting paging information of massive connections. This leads to overload of the dedicated resources, and consequently increased padding bits and low resource efficiency. Moreover, UE power consumption would also rise due to the extra effort to decode larger packets. To solve above problems, a new resource allocation method is proposed, which includes a new definition of paging resource set and corresponding resource selection method. Link level simulation is conducted to show the benefit of our proposals. It is observed that approximately power consumption could be saved by 80% and the resource efficiency could be improved by 30.5% by utilizing our proposed methods.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new paradigm that gives rise to Low Power Wide Are Networks (LP-WAN). Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a particular network arquitecture built on the legacy of LTE that is most suitable for IoT applications. In this paper, we present our work towards the implementation of a protocol simulator for NB-IoT communications. A summary of the NB-IoT physical layer is presented, deepening on the description of the uplink channel and ending with a description of the uplink scheduling process. As an application of our toolbox, we present NB-IoT uplink block error rate (BLER) curves traced via link layer simulations and derive the optimal link adaptation for an Additive White Gaussian Noise () channel.

Wireless technology is one of the enabler for Internet of Things (IoT) with a tremendous expected growth in the next years. The variety of wireless technologies to support different requirements like coverage or network architecture transform the wireless industry in a very competitive segment. There are many solutions for short and middle range IoT communication however, there is not still a long range solution that is broader adopted by the industry, which is generally know as Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWAN) technology. There LPWAN has not been designed for mobile network but the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), that is responsible for 3G and 4G standardization, created the new technology that is named Narrow-Band IoT (NB-IoT) which intends to be widely adopted by the Operators. This article presents a summary of the NB-IoT specifications and some comparisons with others LPWAN technologies.

Chapter 6 - Internet of Things (NB-IoT and Massive MTC)

Deploying Internet of Things (IoT) on a large scale necessitates widespread network infrastructures supporting Machine Type Communication. Integrating IoT into cellular networks like LTE, known as Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT), can fulfill this infrastructure need. Standard 3GPP Release 13 introduces NB-IoT's Repetition features, expanding radio transmission coverage while maintaining LTE performance. Focusing on uplink data traffic, this study examines NB-IoT's repetition mechanism, grid resource distribution, and NPUSCH performance through simulations. Results show that at SNR greater than -5 dB, maximum repetitions of 128 yield the highest BLER, while minimum repetitions of 2 result in the lowest. Quadrupling repetitions increases SNR by 5 dB, emphasizing repetition's role in error mitigation and uplink reliability, especially in challenging SNR conditions. For optimal throughput in SNR above -5 dB, maximum repetitions of 128 for NPUSCH format 1 are recommended. These findings underscore the importance of repetition in enhancing Narrowband IoT performance, offering insights for system optimization, where increasing the number of repetitions generally leads to higher SNR gain. The attained BLER and throughput values from Narrowband IoT simulations highlight the robustness of data transmission across varying channel conditions, affirming NB-IoT applicability to a wide range of IoT applications.

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) became a complement part of the fifth-generation (5G) network’s specifications due to its superiority to the other IoT networks from many different aspects. However, the relation between NB-IoT spectral efficiency and the type of IoT application is not studied enough. This paper evaluates the NB-IoT uplink scheduler’s performance based on the current standard for the four different NB-IoT data rates to study three performance metrics for each one. We apply our analysis to the traffic of periodic IoT applications. The Simulink environment’s State-flow toolbox is exploited, which supports state-machine modeling methodology to benefit from their features to model the NB-IoT access network’s uplink scheduler with a scalable model capability for future works. After verification and validation, our simulation results depict that the NB-IoT single-tone data rate achieves the highest resources utilization, and it is the optimum choice to carry periodic IoT traffic.

The Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) system has become an important branch of the Internet of Everything and is an indispensable part in future fifth Generation (5G) network. However, there is currently no effective access authentication scheme for the NB-IoT system in the future 5G network. According to the current 3GPP standard, NB-IoT devices still use the traditional access authentication method to perform the mutual authentication with the network, which may bring a lot of signaling and communication overheads. This problem will be more prominent when sea of NB-IoT devices simultaneously are activated in the 5G network. In this paper, we propose a quantum-resistance access authentication and data distribution scheme for massive NB-IoT devices. This scheme can implement access authentication and data transmission for a group of NB-IoT devices at the same time based on the lattice-based homomorphic encryption technology. Our scheme can not only greatly reduce the network burden, but also can achieve the strong security including privacy protection and resisting quantum attacks. Performance analysis results show that our solution has the desired efficiency.