Spectral-Energy Efficient Management of NB-IoT Systems

Advisors: Amin Azari (aazari@kth.se), Cicek Cavdar (cavdar@kth.se)

Background
Machine to machine (M2M) communications, also known as machine-type communications
(MTC), means the communications of machine devices without human intervention, which is
applicable to health monitoring, smart metering, remote security, and so on. The continuing
growth in demand from cellular-based M2M communications, 34-fold from 2014 to 2019,
encourages mobile networks operators to investigate evolutionary and revolutionary radio
access technologies for accommodating M2M traffic in order to decrease the revenue gap. A big
step towards realization of massive connectivity over5G networks has been taken by
introduction of NB-IoT in LTERel 13, which will be continued in future releases of LTE [1-3].In
NB-IoT systems, communications is carried out in a narrowbandwidth allocated to IoT
communications, which results inmore than 20 dB link budget improvement. Regarding the
factthat the legacy signaling and communication protocols havebeen designed for large
bandwidths, NB-IoT with 200 KHzbandwidth is considered as a revolutionary solution.

Problem Formulation
Regarding the fact that NB-IoT is a revolutionary solution, there is no study on spectral/energy
efficient management of NB-IoT systems. Specially, when it comes to the scheduling of physical
channels, the impact of scheduling of different channels, e.g. NPRACH 1, on different quality
metrics, e.g. delay and battery lifetime,have not been studied. Here, given information about
statistics of IoT traffic, we design mode-switching communications management policies for
NB-IoT in order to maximize the utilization of allocated resources to IoT traffic, and in the same
time, prolong battery lifetime of connected devices.

Expected Contribution
Primary expected outcome of this project is to introduce and clarify the tradeoffs between
experienced delay, energy efficiency, and spectral efficiency in NB-IoT.

Type of Project:
Analysis and simulation. Primary simulator is provided by advisor.

References
[1] 3GPP TR 45.820, “Technical Specification Group GSM/EDGE Radio Access Network; Cellular system
support for ultra-low complexity and low throughput Internet of Things (CIoT),” 2015.
[2] Y. P. E. Wang et al., “A primer on 3GPP narrowband internet of things,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 55, no. 3,
pp. 117–123, March 2017.
[3] J. Schlienz and D. Raddino, “Narrowband internet of things,” Rohde and Schwarz, Tech. Rep., 08 2016.

1
Narrow band physical random access channel