Ultra-narrowband (UNB) communications has become a signature feature for many emerging low-power wide-area (LPWA) networks. Specifically, using extremely narrowband signals helps the network connect more Internet-of-things (IoT) devices within a given band. It also improves robustness to interference, extending the coverage of the network. In this paper, we study the coexistence capability of UNB networks and their scalability to enable massive access. To this end, we develop a stochastic geometry framework to analyze and model UNB networks on a large scale. The framework captures the unique characteristics of UNB communications, including the asynchronous time-frequency access, signal repetition, and the absence of base station (BS) association. Closed-form expressions of the transmission success probability and network connection density are presented for several UNB protocols. We further discuss multiband access for UNB networks, proposing a low-complexity protocol. Our analysis reveals several insights on the geographical diversity achieved when devices do not connect to a single BS, the optimal number of signal repetitions, and how to utilize multiple bands without increasing the complexity of BSs. Simulation results are provided to validate the analysis, and they show that UNB communications enables a single BS to connect thousands of devices even when the spectrum is shared with other networks.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is going to have its presence in all the essential sectors of human lives. It has the ability to provide both mainstream as well as the value added services in almost all the sectors. Healthcare is an important service sector for overall development. It has far reaching implications in the quality of living. In the modern world where the quality of living has been degraded significantly IoT can certainly play a constructive role in providing better services. In healthcare, there are several occasions such as patient health monitoring, remote observation and emergen…
The Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a cellular access technology developed by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to provide wide area connectivity for the Internet of Things. Since its introduction in 3GPP Release 13, NB-IoT has in a few years achieved a remarkable market presence and is currently providing coverage in close to 100 countries. To further extend the reach of NB-IoT and to connect the unconnected, 3GPP Release 17 will study the feasibility of adapting NB-IoT to support non-terrestrial networks (NTNs). In this article, we review the fundamentals of NB-IoT an…
Internet of things (IoT) is very much attractive for several sensor based applications. It provides large coverage of the services with small amount of resources. Its applications span from the ordinary scenarios such as sensing in the common digital ecosystem to the far more complicated processes of modern manufacturing, agriculture, security provisioning, location tracking and health care. Several types of IoTs have been proposed for the recent applications. Narrowband IoT (NBIoT) is one of the economical versions of the IoTs. It is a low power wide area network technology and thus suitable …
Ultra-narrowband (UNB) communications is an emerging paradigm that tackles two challenges to realizing massive Internet-of-things (IoT) connectivity over the unlicensed spectrum: the intra-network sharing, i.e., how the spectrum is shared among IoT devices, and the inter-network sharing, i.e., the coexistence of the IoT network with other incumbent networks. Specifically, intra-network sharing is enabled by using extremely narrowband signals to connect a massive number of IoT devices without any prior network synchronization. Further, to enhance robustness to incumbent interference, each IoT p…
In this work, we consider a novel type of Internet of Things (IoT) ultra-narrowband (UNB) network architecture that involves multiple multiplexing bands or channels for uplink transmission. An IoT device can randomly choose any of the multiplexing bands and transmit its packet. Due to hardware constraints, a base station (BS) is able to listen to only one multiplexing band. The hardware constraint is mainly due to the complexity of performing fast Fourier transform (FFT) at a very small sampling interval over the multiplexing bands in order to counter the uncertainty of IoT device frequency an…
Narrowband internet-of-things (NB-IoT) is a competitive 5G technology for massive machine-type communication scenarios, but meanwhile introduces narrowband interference (NBI) to existing broadband transmission such as the long term evolution (LTE) systems in enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) scenarios. In order to facilitate the harmonic and fair coexistence in wireless heterogeneous networks, it is important to eliminate NB-IoT interference to LTE systems. In this paper, a novel sparse machine learning based framework and a sparse combinatorial optimization problem is formulated for accurate N…
One of the main challenges in IoT is providing communication support to an increasing number of connected devices. In recent years, narrowband radio technology has emerged to address this situation: Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT), which is now part of 5G. Supporting massive connectivity becomes particularly demanding in extreme coverage scenarios such as underground or deep inside buildings sites. We propose a novel strategy for these situations focused on optimizing NB-IoT shared channels through the selection of link parameters: modulation and coding scheme, as well as the number of …
Synchronization and ranging in internet of things (IoT) networks are challenging due to the narrowband nature of signals used for communication between IoT nodes. Recently, several estimators for range estimation using phase difference of arrival (PDoA) measurements of narrowband signals have been proposed. However, these estimators are based on data models which do not consider the impact of clock-skew on the range estimation. In this paper, clock-skew and range estimation are studied under a unified framework. We derive a novel and precise data model for PDoA measurements which incorporates …
Monitoring of civil infrastructures is critically needed to track aging, damages and ultimately to prevent severe failures which can endanger many lives. The ability to monitor in a continuous and fine-grained fashion the integrity of a wide variety of buildings, referred to as structural health monitoring, with low-cost, long-term and continuous measurements is essential from both an economic and a life-safety standpoint. To address these needs, we propose a low-cost wireless sensor node specifically designed to support modal analysis over extended periods of time with long-range connectivity…
As a forerunner in 5G technologies, Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) will be inevitably coexisting with the legacy Long-Term Evolution (LTE) system. Thus, it is imperative for NB-IoT to mitigate LTE interference. By virtue of the strong temporal correlation of the NB-IoT signal, this letter develops a sparsity adaptive algorithm to recover the NB-IoT signal from legacy LTE interference, by combining $K$-means clustering and sparsity adaptive matching pursuit (SAMP). In particular, the support of the NB-IoT signal is first estimated coarsely by $K$-means clustering and SAMP algorithm with…
Several Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications provide location-based services, wherein it is critical to obtain accurate position estimates by aggregating information from individual sensors. In the recently proposed narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) standard, which trades off bandwidth to gain wide coverage, the location estimation is compounded by the low sampling rate receivers and limited-capacity links. We address both of these NB-IoT drawbacks in the framework of passive sensing devices that receive signals from the target-of-interest. We consider the limiting case where each node receiver employs…
Timing detection is the first step and very important in wireless communication systems. Timing detection performance is usually affected by the frequency offset. Therefore, it is a challenge to design the synchronization signal in massive narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) scenarios where the frequency offset is usually large due to the low cost requirement. In this paper, we firstly proposed a new general synchronization signal structure with a couple of sequences which are conjugated to remove the potential timing error arose from large frequency offset. Then, we analyze the suitable se…
Recent study predicts that by 2020 up to 50 billion IoT devices will be connected to the Internet, straining the capacity of wireless network that has already been overloaded with data-hungry mobile applications, such as high-definition video streaming and virtual reality(VR)/augmented reality(AR). How to accommodate the demand for both massive scale of IoT devices and high-speed cellular services in the physically limited spectrum without significantly increasing the operational and infrastructure costs is one of the main challenges for operators. In this article, we introduce a new multi-ope…
Internet of things (IoT) has been proven to be a ubiquitous technology for several existing and new applications. It can provide both accuracy and sustainability in the emerging services and applications. IoT has several advantages and it can provide different levels of coverage in different geographical locations and contexts. There are several applications in which the wide coverage, low power and reliability of the communication have very high priorities. Conglomeration of IoT and satellite networks can make it very attractive for these applications. In this article, we present the general …
Positioning is becoming a key component in many Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The main challenges and limitations are the narrow bandwidth, low power and low cost which reduces the accuracy of the time of arrival (TOA) estimation. In this paper, we consider the positioning scenario of Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) that can benefit from observed time difference of arrival (OTDOA). By applying the deep learning based technique, we explore the generalization and feature extraction abilities of neural networks to tackle the aforementioned challenges. As demonstrated in the numerical experiments…
5G NB-IoT is seen as a key technology for providing truly ubiquitous, global 5G coverage (1.000.000 devices/km2) for machine type communications in the internet of things. A non-terrestrial network (NTN) variant of NB-IoT is being standardized in the 3GPP, which along with inexpensive and non-complex chip-sets enables the production of competitively priced IoT devices with truly global coverage. NB-IoT allows for narrowband single carrier transmissions in the uplink, which improves the uplink link-budget by as much as 16.8 dB over the 180 [kHz] downlink. This allows for a long range sufficient…
Sixth-generation (6G) of mobile communication aims to connect this world digitally through green communication networks that provide secure, ubiquitous, and unlimited connectivity in an attempt to improve the overall quality of life.The driving force behind the development of these networks is the rapid evolution of Internet-of-Things (IoT), which has stimulated the proliferation of wireless applications in health,education, agriculture, utilities, etc. However, these applications are accompanied by the deployment of a massive number of IoT devices that require a significant radio spectrum for…
The satellite component is recognized as a promising solution to complement and extend the coverage of future Internet of things (IoT) terrestrial networks (TNs). In this context, a study item to integrate satellites into narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) systems has been approved within the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardization body. However, as NB-IoT systems were initially conceived for TNs, their basic design principles and operation might require some key modifications when incorporating the satellite component. These changes in NB-IoT systems, therefore, need to be carefully im…
In this paper, we propose a dynamic spectrum sensing-based architecture to provide connectivity for a massive number of Internet-of-things (IoT) objects over the unlicensed spectrum. Specifically, the architecture relies on deploying sensing access points (SAPs), e.g., small cells with sensing capabilities, that aim to (i) identify a large number of narrowband channels in a wideband spectrum, as many massive IoT applications have low-rate requirements, and (ii) aggressively reuse the unlicensed channels at the SAPs' locations as IoT devices typically transmit at low power, occupying a small sp…
Providing Internet connectivity to a massive number of Internet-of-things (IoT) objects over the unlicensed spectrum requires: (i) identifying a very large number of narrowband channels in a wideband spectrum and (ii) aggressively reusing the available channels over space to accommodate the high density of IoT devices. To this end, we propose a sensing-based architecture that identifies spectral and spatial resources at a fine resolution. In particular, we first propose a sensing assignment scheduler, where each base station (BS) is assigned a subset of the spectrum to sense at a high resoluti…
In the recent years, world has witnessed the ubiquitous applications of Internet of things (IoT) for many different scenarios. There are several critical applications where the results are essential and the mission has to be successful at any cost. Such applications are well known as mission critical applications. These applications are really critical and deal with very serious situations such as disaster management, rescue operations and military applications. IoT can provide both accuracy and sustainability in these applications. IoT in fact, is suitable for several critical applications be…
NarrowBand-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new 3GPP radio access technology designed to provide better coverage for a massive number of low-throughput low-cost devices in delay-tolerant applications with low power consumption. To provide reliable connections with extended coverage, a repetition transmission scheme is introduced to NB-IoT during both Random Access CHannel (RACH) procedure and data transmission procedure. To avoid the difficulty in replacing the battery for IoT devices, the energy harvesting is considered as a promising solution to support energy sustainability in the NB-IoT ne…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is penetrating many facets of our daily life with the proliferation of intelligent services and applications empowered by artificial intelligence (AI). Traditionally, AI techniques require centralized data collection and processing that may not be feasible in realistic application scenarios due to the high scalability of modern IoT networks and growing data privacy concerns. Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a distributed collaborative AI approach that can enable many intelligent IoT applications, by allowing for AI training at distributed IoT devices without …
This paper proposes and investigates an overlay spectrum sharing system in conjunction with the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) to enable communications for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Considered is a cooperative cognitive radio network, where two IoT devices (IoDs) exchange their information and also provide relay assistance to a pair of primary users (PUs). Different from most existing works, in this paper, both IoDs can harvest energy from the radio-frequency (RF) signals received from the PUs. By utilizing the harvested energy, they provide relay…
We consider a novel ultra-narrowband (UNB) low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) architecture design for uplink transmission of a massive number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices over multiple multiplexing bands. An IoT device can randomly choose any of the multiplexing bands to transmit its packet. Due to hardware constraints, a base station (BS) is able to listen to only one multiplexing band. Our main objective is to maximize the packet decoding probability (PDP) by optimizing the placement of the BSs and frequency assignment of BSs to multiplexing bands. We develop two online approaches th…
NarrowBand-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new 3GPP radio access technology designed to provide better coverage for Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks. To provide reliable connections with extended coverage, a repetition transmission scheme and up to three Coverage Enhancement (CE) groups are introduced into NB-IoT during both Random Access CHannel (RACH) procedure and data transmission procedure, where each CE group is configured with different repetition values and transmission resources. To characterize the RACH performance of the NB-IoT network with three CE groups, this paper develops a…
Heterogeneous network (HetNet) is a specified cellular platform to tackle the rapidly growing anticipated data traffic. From communications perspective, data loads can be mapped to energy loads that are generally placed on the operator networks. Meanwhile, renewable energy aided networks offer to curtail fossil fuel consumption, so to reduce environmental pollution. This paper proposes a renewable energy based power supply architecture for off-grid HetNet using a novel energy sharing model. Solar photovoltaic (PV) along with sufficient energy storage devices are used for each macro, micro, pic…
Beyond the RF Paradigm: Rydberg Atomic Receivers for Next-Generation IoT
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）；Shanxi University（山西大学）；Brunel University of London（伦敦布鲁内尔大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Memorial University（纪念大学）；Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）
Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Technology Innovation Institute（技术创新研究所）
The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has dramatically expanded our daily lives, playing a pivotal role in the enablement of smart cities, healthcare, and buildings. Emerging technologies, such as IoT, seek to improve the quality of service in cognitive cities. Although IoT applications are helpful in smart building applications, they present a real risk as the large number of interconnected devices in those buildings, using heterogeneous networks, increases the number of potential IoT attacks. IoT applications can collect and transfer sensitive data. Therefore, it is necessary to de…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
To enable serendipitous interaction for indoor IoT environments, spontaneous device associations are of particular interest so that users set up a connection in an ad-hoc manner. Based on the similarity of light signals, our system named DevLoc takes advantage of ubiquitous light sources around us to perform continuous and seamless device grouping. We provide a configuration framework to control the spatial granularity of user's proximity by managing the lighting infrastructure through customized visible light communication. To realize either proximity-based or location-based services, we supp…
The world is undergoing a profound transformation with the advent of intelligent information era. 6G networks envisioned being the game changer in next generation wireless communication systems that will address the challenges of limited information speed escalated with the augmentation of billions of data applications encountered by the current fifth generation (5G) networks. Some key radical technologies in 6G together with existing 5G candidate schemes will guarantee the expected quality of experience (QoE) to attain ubiquitous wireless connectivity for the Internet of Everything (IoE) rang…
