No abstract

Low power wide area network (LPWAN) is a wireless telecommunication network that is designed for interconnecting devices with low bitrate focusing on long range and power efficiency. In this paper, we study two recent technologies built from existing Long-Term Evolution (LTE) functionalities:Enhanced machine type communications (eMTC) and Narrow band internet of things (NB-IoT). These technologies are designed to coexist with existing LTE infrastructure, spectrum, and devices. We first briefly introduce both systems and then compare their performance in terms of energy consumption, latency and scalability. We introduce a model for calculating the energy consumption and study the effect of clock drift and propose a method to overcome it. We also propose a model for analytically evaluating the latency and the maximum number of devices in a network. Furthermore, we implement the main functionality of both technologies and simulate the end-to-end latency and maximum number of devices in a discrete-event network simulator NS-3. Numerical results show that 8 years battery life time can be achieved by both technologies in a poor coverage scenario and that depending on the coverage conditions and data length, one technology consumes less energy than the other. The results also show that eMTC can serve more devices in a network than NB-IoT, while providing a latency that is 10 times lower.

We consider a system that consists of two sources, a half-duplex relay and a destination. The sources want to transmit their messages reliably to the destination with the help of the relay. We study and analyze the performance of a transmission scheme in which the relay implements a decode-and-forward strategy. We assume that all the channels are frequency selective, and in order to cope with that, we incorporate Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmission into the system. In contrast to previous works, both sources can transmit their messages using all subcarriers and the relay can decide to help none, only one, or both sources. For this scheme, we discuss the design criteria and evaluate the achievable sum-rate. Next, we study and solve the problem of resource allocation aiming at maximizing the achievable sum-rate. We propose an iterative coordinate-descent algorithm that finds a solution that is at least a local optimum. We show through numerical examples the effectiveness of the algorithms and illustrate the benefits of allowing both sources to transmit on all subcarriers.

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology released by 3GPP. The primary goals of NB-IoT are improved coverage, massive capacity, low cost, and long battery life. In order to improve coverage, NB-IoT has promising solutions, such as increasing transmission repetitions, decreasing bandwidth, and adapting the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS). In this paper, we present an implementation of coverage enhancement features of NB-IoT in NS-3, an end-to-end network simulator. The resource allocation and link adaptation in NS-3 are modified to comply with the new features of NB-IoT. Using the developed simulation framework, the influence of the new features on network reliability and latency is evaluated. Furthermore, an optimalhybrid link adaptation strategy based on all three features is proposed. To achieve this, we formulate an optimization problem that has an objective function based on latency, and constraint based on the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). Then, we propose several algorithms to minimize latency and compare them with respect to accuracy and speed. The best hybrid solution is chosen and implemented in the NS-3 simulator by which the latency formulation is verified. The numerical results show that the proposed optimization algorithm for hybrid link adaptation is eight times faster than the exhaustive search approach and yields similar latency.

In this paper, we consider a system in which multiple users communicate with a destination with the help of multiple half-duplex relays. Based on the compute-and-forward scheme, each relay, instead of decoding the users' messages, decodes an integer-valued linear combination that relates the transmitted messages. Then, it forwards the linear combination towards the destination. Given these linear combinations, the destination may or may not recover the transmitted messages since the linear combinations are not always full rank. Therefore, we propose an algorithm where we optimize the precoding factor at the users such that the probability that the equations are full rank is increased and that the transmission rate is maximized. We show, through some numerical examples, the effectiveness of our algorithm and the advantage of performing precoding allocation at the users. Also, we show that this scheme can outperform standard relaying techniques in certain regimes.