A Digital Twin (DT) approach to Narrow-Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) wireless communication optimization in an industrial scenario

Abstract

The pervasive realization of virtual replication of physical entities termed Digital Twin (DT) has been utilized in this paper to optimize the wireless communication of the Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) in an industrial scenario. This optimization is exclusively achieved through DT approach. NB-IoT is a Low-Powered Wide Area Network (LPWAN) standardized by 3GPP and leverages Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. The Amplify-and-Forward (AF) optimization technique is used to improve the performance of some notably poor-performing terminals in the scenario. Bit-Error-Rate (BER) tests show the terminals’ overall performance before and after optimization. An improvement of 17% is achieved in BER. The signal quality of the channels is analyzed as well as the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) is used to showcase the effective throughput performance of the NB-IoT terminals.