On the Evaluation of the NB-IoT Random Access Procedure in Monitoring Infrastructures

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.

Building Upon NB-IoT Networks: A Roadmap Towards 5G New Radio Networks

“…Besides, RA performance in the higher CE level has not been considered. The research work of [95] presents an efficient 3GPP open-source simulator tool capable of investigating and modeling the behavior of RAP in NB-IoT technology. The authors explain three aspects of the usefulness of the simulation tool as; i) for analytical modeling of RAP in estimating the number of users operating RAP and an extensive study of the average endto-end delay, ii) achieving both collision and successprobabilities incorporated into the RAP and finally, for cross-validation of the analytical model and simulation tool taking into consideration the enabling periodic report of the device referencing application networks.…”

Cooperative Cognitive Network Slicing Virtualization for Smart IoT Applications

“…The baseband utilizes the sub-1GHz frequency band-20 with channel bandwidth of 180 KHz and carrier spacing of 15KHz. Sub-1GHz bands are used for low cost IoT devices due to ideal propagation conditions [5], while the 180KHz bandwidth is selected when considering IoT as highlighted in [34]. The aforementioned configuration results in 10 channels with 1 resource block (RB) each and 1 component carrier (CC).…”

“…The aforementioned configuration results in 10 channels with 1 resource block (RB) each and 1 component carrier (CC). We also employ the standalone operation mode as described in [34] and [32] with single tone transmission mode and QPSK modulation type. QPSK modulation is utilized by the IoT downlink channel as the 3GPP standard overview of the release 14 shows in [33].…”

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“…NB-IoT, as a derivative of LTE, employs a more complex random access procedure [ 38 ]. The node first has to request access prior to transmitting an uplink message.…”