Design and FPGA-Based Hardware Implementation of NB-IoT Physical Uplink Shared Channel Transmitter and Physical Downlink Shared Channel Receiver

Abstract

With the anticipated growth of the internet of things (IoT) market, many low-power wide-area (LPWA) technologies have been introduced to connect a wide range of IoT devices with varying performance requirements. The narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) is a 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) standardized LPWA technology that meets most IoT service requirements. In this paper, the design and implementation of the physical uplink transmitting chain as well as the physical downlink receiving chain of the NB-IoT user equipment (UE) are presented. Both chains’ main blocks are designed to follow the 3GPP NB-IoT LTE standard Release 14 (Rel-14). The whole design is experimentally implemented on the Virtex 7 (VC 709) Connectivity kit, and all performance metrics are reported. Moreover, an NB-IoT base station is implemented and integrated with the two prototyped UEs to set-up an NB-IoT system, which is employed to send data from one UE to another UE through the NB-IoT base station using two FPGAs (one to implement the sending UE and the other one to implement the receiving UE) and three universal software radio peripherals (USRPs) B200 (one to implement the RF front-end of the transmitting UE FPGA, one to implement the base station RF front-end, and one to implement the RF front-end of the receiving UE FPGA). Experimental results show that the implemented NB-IoT system is working successfully, as the two NB-IoT UEs communicate together successfully through the NB-IoT base station and exchange the data properly.