Abstract
The Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) has been introduced in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Rel-13 with the aim to provide low-cost, low-power, wide-area cellular connectivity for the Internet of Things. With the exponentially increasing number of connected wireless devices in the order of 100 billion, it has become crucial that researchers develop efficient resource management techniques to meet the 5 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">th</sup> Generation (5G) quality of service (QoS) requirements. Recently, several research challenges including the low modulation data rates, energy-expensive channel coding techniques, and the fast-growing number of connected devices have been identified as some of the main issues encountered in the design and deployment of NB-IoT systems. In addition, several techniques have emerged in the literature to resolve some of these challenges of NB-IoT systems. However, the research activities towards the enhancement of the NB-IoT resource management are yet to continue in the next half-decade before, high data rates, energy-efficient, and scalable NB-IoT specifications can be released for the standardisation and commercialisation. Considering the limited number of existing surveys of such technical enhancement approaches in a broader perspective (i.e. energy efficiency, data rate performance and scalability) and also the non-existence, to the best of our knowledge, of a comparative survey, this paper seeks to elaborate, describe and compare the performances of such resources management approaches. Of the multiple NB-IoT resources, the focus of this paper is on the data rate, energy efficiency, and scalability enhancement schemes that have been proposed for the last three years. The contribution of the paper lies in the analysis, synthesis, comparison and summarised alignments of some of the major existing schemes towards identifying challenges faced by the NB-IoT development. Finally, this work seeks to identify research challenges, open questions, and opportunities that could arise from the existing techniques analysed.
Highlights
INTRODUCTIONThe Long Range (LoRa) Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technology operates in the nonLicensed band below 1 GHz for long range communication
The proposed approach is expected to significantly reduce the number of random accesses and the energy consumed by radio transmission, and reduce the overall Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-Internet of Things (IoT)) network energy consumption [111]
The simulation results reveal that the proposed advanced signal waveform could achieve an improvement of 25% on data rate when compared to Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)
Summary
The LoRa LPWAN technology operates in the nonLicensed band below 1 GHz for long range communication It uses Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) modulation at the PHY layer which allows it to trade data rate (low) for sensitivity within a fixed channel bandwidth making it quite robust against interference. The common idea behind most proposed approaches consists of a trade off between high data rate and higher energy in each transmitted bit (or symbol) at the physical layer (PHY) This design technique allows for a signal that is more immune to noise and interference and that can travel longer transmission distances. Most NB-IoT systems use the star network topology by connecting end devices directly to base stations obviating the need for the dense and expensive deployments of relays and gateways altogether This technique results in huge energy savings. These techniques include Observed Time Difference of Arrival (OTDoA) [38] and Received Signal Strength indicator (RSSI) [39] for example
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