Abstract
Narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) is a recent cellular radio access technology based on Long-Term Evolution (LTE) introduced by Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN). The main aim of NB-IoT is to support massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and enable low-power, low-cost, and low-data-rate communication. NB-IoT is based on LTE design with some changes to meet the mMTC requirements. For example, in the physical (PHY) layer only single-antenna and low-order modulations are supported, and in the Medium Access Control (MAC) layers only one physical resource block is allocated for resource scheduling. The aim of this survey is to provide a comprehensive overview of the design changes brought in the NB-IoT standardization along with the detailed research developments from the perspectives of Physical and MAC layers. The survey also includes an overview of Evolved Packet Core (EPC) changes to support the Service Capability Exposure Function (SCEF) to manage both IP and non-IP data packets through Control Plane (CP) and User Plane (UP), the possible deployment scenarios of NB-IoT in future Heterogeneous Wireless Networks (HetNet). Finally, existing and emerging research challenges in this direction are presented to motivate future research activities.
Highlights
According to Information Handling Services (IHS) technology forecast, the Internet of Things (IoT) market is expected to grow to billions of devices by 2020 [1]
Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) User Equipment (UE) goes through the same process as Long-Term Evolution (LTE) UE where to camp on a cell, it goes through frequency and timing synchronization to obtain the center carrier frequency as well as the allocated slot and frame timing used for the cell acquisition
Due to the fact that most of the existing works are segmented and only consider one or two releases in their corresponding studies or simulations, this paper has presented a comprehensive overview of NB-IoT standard from Release 13 to Release 16 prospects to enhance and enable more realistic research
Summary
According to Information Handling Services (IHS) technology forecast, the Internet of Things (IoT) market is expected to grow to billions of devices by 2020 [1]. The term Narrowband refers to NB-IoT’s bandwidth of maximum 200 kHz thanks to which it can coexist either in the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) spectrum or by occupying one of the legacy LTE Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs) as in-band or as guard-band Since it coexists in the LTE spectrum, NB-IoT follows the legacy LTE numerologies as it uses Orthogonal Frequency. Despite its low complexity, this new radio access technology (RAT) delivers better performance in terms of the supported number of devices, and coverage enhancements for latency-insensitive applications with maximum coupling loss (MCL) of about 20 dB higher than LTE (i.e., 164 dB) [5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. In [28], the authors discussed the Release 13 features and compared its performance with respect to other communication technologies such as LTE-M, SigFox, Lora and Wireless-Fidelity (WiFi), etc.
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