Abstract
A suitability assessment and performance optimisation is presented of narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) cellular technology for use in smart energy distribution networks. The focus is on the reliable and timely delivery of outage restoration and management (ORM) messages at the event of a local or regional power outage. Both the cellular NB-IoT and the energy distribution networks are modelled in a system-level simulator, which is used to carry out an extensive sensitivity analysis of the ORM service performance w.r.t. various radio network configurations in different environments. In particular, different packet schedulers are proposed and analysed, addressing device prioritization and subcarrier allocation as essential mechanisms in optimizing the service performance. Furthermore, we consider all three possible NB-IoT spectral deployment modes: in-band, guard-band and stand-alone deployment. Results show that, with a proposed near-optimal radio network configuration, the reliability of the ORM message delivery is close to 100% for the majority of power outage scenarios, while the observed 95th transfer delay percentile for the ORM messages is within the acceptable limit of 20 s. The study concludes that indeed NB-IoT is a suitable technology for supporting ORM services in smart energy distribution networks.
Highlights
1 Introduction The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) [1] standardised a radio access technology known as Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) as part of its Release 13 specifications, in support of the huge growth in the number of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices [2]
In its subsequent Release and Release specifications, 3GPP has introduced some enhancements to NB-IoT, including the support of mobility, increased data rate (Release 14), reduced latency and higher reliability (Release 15). 3GPP has further agreed that NB-IoT will continue to evolve as part of the 5G specifications [3]
2 Methods This study aims to deliver an extensive performance assessment of the NB-IoT technology in the context of the outage restoration and management (ORM) use case in smart grids and recommend radio network configurations that may provide near-optimal performance
Summary
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) [1] standardised a radio access technology known as Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) as part of its Release specifications, in support of the huge growth in the number of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices [2]. In its subsequent Release and Release specifications, 3GPP has introduced some enhancements to NB-IoT, including the support of mobility, increased data rate (Release 14), reduced latency and higher reliability (Release 15). Li et al [17] analyses the usage of NB-IoT in the smart grid domain It compares NB-IoT with other alternative smart grid communication means in terms of, among others, data rate, latency and range. It presents linklevel NB-IoT performance for some typical smart grids applications in both rural and urban environments
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