Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is gaining momentum as a promising technology for massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC). Given that its deployment is rapidly progressing worldwide, measurement campaigns and performance analyses are needed to better understand the system and move toward its enhancement. With this aim, this paper presents a large scale measurement campaign and empirical analysis of NB-IoT on operational networks, and discloses valuable insights in terms of deployment strategies and radio coverage performance. The reported results also serve as examples showing the potential usage of the collected dataset, which we make open-source along with a lightweight data visualization platform.
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…
Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new cellular technology introduced in 3GPP Release 13 for providing wide-area coverage for the Internet of Things (IoT). This article provides an overview of the air interface of NB-IoT. We describe how NB-IoT addresses key IoT requirements such as deployment flexibility, low device complexity, long battery life time, support of massive number of devices in a cell, and significant coverage extension beyond existing cellular technologies. We also share the various design rationales during the standardization of NB-IoT in Release 13 and point out sever…
The Long-Range Wide-Area Network (LoRaWAN) specification was released in 2015, primarily to support the Internet-of-Things by facilitating wireless communication over long distances. Since 2015, the role-out and adoption of LoRaWAN has seen a steep growth. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to have extensively measured, analyzed, and modeled the performance, features, and use cases of an operational LoRaWAN, namely The Things Network. Our measurement data, as presented in this paper, cover the early stages up to the production-level deployment of LoRaWAN. In particular, we analyze …
The introduction of Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) as a cellular IoT technology aims to support massive Machine-Type Communications applications. These applications are characterized by massive connections from a large number of low-complexity and low-power devices. One of the goals of NB-IoT is to improve coverage extension beyond existing cellular technologies. In order to do that, NB-IoT introduces transmission repetitions and different bandwidth allocation configurations in uplink. These new transmission approaches yield many transmission options in uplink. In this paper, we propos…
Narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT) is one of the major access technologies proposed to support massive machine type communications (mMTC) services for the 5th generation (5G) mobile networks. Many emerging services and networking paradigms are expected to be developed on top of NB-IoT networks. This paper summarizes the steps required to build up an open source narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT) network. This work is a joint research and development (R&D) result from industry and academic collaboration. The open source NB-IoT enhanced Node B (eNB) is jointly developed by B-COM and NTUS…
To enhance the coverage and transmission reliability, repetitions adopted by Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) allow repeating transmissions several times. However, this results in a waste of radio resources when the signal strength is high. In addition, in low signal quality, the selection of a higher modulation and coding scheme (MCS) level leads to a huge packet loss in the network. Moreover, the number of physical resource blocks (PRBs) per-user needs to be chosen dynamically, such that the utilization of radio resources can be improved on per-user basis. Therefore, in NB-IoT systems,…
Narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) is an emerging cellular technology that will provide improved coverage for massive number of low-throughput low-cost devices with low device power consumption in delay-tolerant applications. A new single tone signal with frequency hopping has been designed for NB-IoT physical random access channel (NPRACH). In this letter we describe this new NPRACH design and explain in detail the design rationale. We further propose possible receiver algorithms for NPRACH detection and time-of-arrival estimation. Simulation results on NPRACH performance including detect…
Many use cases in the Internet of Things (IoT) will require or benefit from location information, making positioning a vital dimension of the IoT. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has dedicated a significant effort during its Release 14 to enhance positioning support for its IoT technologies to further improve the 3GPP-based IoT eco-system. In this article, we identify the design challenges of positioning support in Long-Term Evolution Machine Type Communication (LTE-M) and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), and overview the 3GPP's work in enhancing the positioning support for LTE-M and NB-…
Large-scale deployments of massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC) involve several challenges on cellular networks. To address the challenges of mMTC, or more generally, Internet of Things (IoT), the 3rd Generation Partnership Project has developed NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT) as part of Release 13. NB-IoT is designed to provide better indoor coverage, support of a massive number of low-throughput devices, with relaxed delay requirements, and lower-energy consumption. NB-IoT reuses Long Term Evolution functionality with simplifications and optimizations. Particularly for small data transmissions…
Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) technology was introduced in 3GPP Release 13 to accommodate device-generated traffic over cellular networks. There have been efforts in Release 14 to deliver further improvements to facilitate the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) use cases, such as coverage enhancement, and support for low cost, low complexity and low power consumption device. Small cell NB-IoT is added as an attractive feature in 3GPP Release 15. In this article, we provide an overview of this feature and try to shed light on major aspects of small cell deployment in NB-IoT systems…
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 …
This paper explores the feasibility, advantages, and challenges of an ICN-based approach in the Internet of Things. We report on the first NDN experiments in a life-size IoT deployment, spread over tens of rooms on several floors of a building. Based on the insights gained with these experiments, the paper analyses the shortcomings of CCN applied to IoT. Several interoperable CCN enhancements are then proposed and evaluated. We significantly decreased control traffic (i.e., interest messages) and leverage data path and caching to match IoT requirements in terms of energy and bandwidth constrai…
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 …
Consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices are extremely popular, providing users with rich and diverse functionalities, from voice assistants to home appliances. These functionalities often come with significant privacy and security risks, with notable recent large scale coordinated global attacks disrupting large service providers. Thus, an important first step to address these risks is to know what IoT devices are where in a network. While some limited solutions exist, a key question is whether device discovery can be done by Internet service providers that only see sampled flow statistics. …
Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the main features in 5G. Low-power wide-area networking (LPWAN) has attracted enormous research interests to enable large scale deployment of IoT, with the design objectives of low cost, wide coverage area, as well as low power consumption. In particular, long battery lifetime is essential since many of the IoT devices will be deployed in hard-to-access locations. Prediction of the battery lifetime depends on the accurate modelling of energy consumption. This paper presents a comprehensive power consumption model for battery lifetime estimation, which is base…
The ongoing trend to move industrial appliances from previously isolated networks to the Internet requires fundamental changes in security to uphold secure and safe operation. Consequently, to ensure end-to-end secure communication and authentication, (i) traditional industrial protocols, e.g., Modbus, are retrofitted with TLS support, and (ii) modern protocols, e.g., MQTT, are directly designed to use TLS. To understand whether these changes indeed lead to secure Industrial Internet of Things deployments, i.e., using TLS-based protocols, which are configured according to security best practic…
Low-power wide-area (LPWA) networks are attracting extensive attention because of their abilities to offer low-cost and massive connectivity to Internet of Things (IoT) devices distributed over wide geographical areas. This article provides a brief overview on the existing LPWA technologies and useful insights to aid the large-scale deployment of LPWA networks. Particularly, we first review the currently competing candidates of LPWA networks, such as narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and long range (LoRa), in terms of technical fundamentals and large-scale deployment potential. Then we present two imple…
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…
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…
In animal monitoring applications, both animal detection and their movement prediction are major tasks. While a variety of animal monitoring strategies exist, most of them rely on mounting devices. However, in real world, it is difficult to find these animals and install mounting devices. In this paper, we propose an animal monitoring application by utilizing wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The objective of the application is to detect locations of endangered species in large-scale wildlife areas and monitor movement of animals without any attached devices. I…
