Narrowband Internet of Things: Simulation and Modeling

Journal Article

As a new type of low power wide area (LPWA) technology, the narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) technology supports wide coverage and low bitrate services, thus it has a great potential to be the future commercial technology of LPWA network. Therefore, it has attracted attention of both academia and industry. In this paper, we present the NB-IoT development, and main characteristics and design objectives of NB-IoT according to 3GPP R13. In addition, we provide the review of related literatures about NB-IoT modeling and algorithm analysis. And we explain current problems of NB-IoT system-level modeling based on visualized simulation platform. Moreover, this paper is devoted to the construction of the NB-IoT model based on OPNET and the verification of its characteristics, such as wide coverage and high channel utilization. This paper mainly considers NB-IoT model design and realization in terms of NB-IoT physical layer characteristics. We summarize the correlated characteristics of NB-IoT uplink and downlink. Then we design and construct the NB-IoT model based on Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. Lastly, we use the constructed NB-IoT model for simulations and conduct an experiment on it using the LTE network with channel bandwidths of 3 MHz, 5 MHz, 10 MHz, 15 MHz, and 20 MHz. The simulation results have verified the performance of NB-IoT, wherein uplink time delay is lower than 10 s, channel utilization is higher than that of LTE network, and coverage area is larger than LTE network.