Abstract
NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT) is emerging as a promising communication technology offering a reliable wireless connection to a large number of devices employed in pervasive monitoring scenarios, such as Smart City, Precision Agriculture, and Industry 4.0. Since most of the NB-IoT transmissions occur in the uplink, the random access channel (that is the primary interface between devices and the base station) may usually become the main bottleneck of the entire system. For this reason, analytical models and simulation tools able to investigate its behavior in different scenarios are of the utmost importance for driving current and future research activities. Unfortunately, scientific literature partially addresses the current open issues by means of simplified and, in many cases, not standard-compliant approaches. To provide a significant step forward in this direction, the contribution of this paper is three-folded. First, it presents a flexible, open-source, and 3GPP-compliant implementation of the NB-IoT random access procedure. Second, it formulates an analytical model capturing both collision and success probabilities associated with the aforementioned procedure. Third, it presents the cross-validation of both the analytical model and the simulation tool, by taking into account reference applications scenarios of sensor networks enabling periodic reporting in monitoring infrastructures. Obtained results prove the remarkable accuracy, demonstrating a well-calibrated instrument, which will be also useful for future research activities.
Highlights
The Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon is broadening at an astoundingly fast rate [1], which promoted the birth of several novel services in different application domains, including, but not limited to, Industry 4.0 [2], Smart Cities [3], Intelligent Transportation Systems [4], PrecisionAgriculture [5], healthcare [6] and environmental monitoring [7]
In a typical NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT) monitoring system, uplink transmissions prevail among the rest of exchanged messages
NB-IoT is emerging as a promising technology for offering wireless connectivity to constrained smart devices deployed in several pervasive monitoring scenarios, such as Smart City, Precision Agriculture, and Industry 4.0
Summary
The Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon is broadening at an astoundingly fast rate [1], which promoted the birth of several novel services in different application domains, including, but not limited to, Industry 4.0 [2], Smart Cities [3], Intelligent Transportation Systems [4], Precision. Starting from the platform presented in [25], it puts forward an open-source and 3GPP-compliant implementation of the NB-IoT random access procedure, which handles different coverage classes, global and local transmission attempts counters, backoff times, and transitions from a class to another, as well as other key simulations. It formulates an analytical model describing both collision and success probabilities, given the number of users willing to perform the random access procedure.
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