NB-IOT COMMUNICATION SYSTEM : A REVIEW

NB-IOT COMMUNICATION SYSTEM : A REVIEW

Rizka Dwiannisa, Sidiq Syamsul Hidayat

Jurusan Teknik Elektro, Politeknik Negeri Semarang

dwiannisarizka@gmail.com, sidiqsh@polines.ac.id

 

Abstract

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new radio access technology, recently standardized in 3GPP to enable support for IoT devices. Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) has been introduced to provide inexpensive, low-power, and broad cellular connectivity for the Internet of Things. This system, based on Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, supports most LTE functions even though with simplification it is important to reduce the complexity of the device. The new NB-IoT developed by 3GPP in the last 2 years, the application developed is smart metering, smart building, smart parking and bicycle sharing. The first operational pilot project using intelligent electric energy meters and NB-IoT communication technology has begun at Parque das Nações in Lisbon. Vodafone has, with the help of a Huawei equipment supplier, increased six BTS to support nB-ioT using the 900Mhz spectrum. The operator uses new technology to connect 42 meters. The next project by a smart building that builds will be equipped with many sensors / actuators that will make an active set of elements that are currently passive. Open the sensor window, measure indoor air quality, the presence of a desk or meeting room, real-time energy consumption that can be controlled by residents. Another product of NB-IoT is smart parking, data is collected by sensors, which provide real-time information about the status of free / occupied parking, about Parking meters and Mobile Applications that send payment related data or parking authorization titles. In Indonesia, NB-IoT always distributes products which are the development of bicycles developed by the University of Indonesia in collaboration with Telkomsel. Since the launch of the NB-IoT many companies have implemented protocols to facilitate human work in the industry. After reviewing, the NB-IoT not yet applied to the public transportation in this case focused on public transportation security and safety that are interesting to research.

Keywords: NB-IoT, LTE, Internet of Things, Product,  Public Transportation

 

1.        INTRODUCTION

The IoT is included by the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) in the list of six Disruptive Civil Technologies with potential impacts on US national power. NIC foresees that by 2025 Internet nodes may reside in everyday things e.g. food packages, furniture, paper documents, and more. It highlights future opportunities that will arise, starting from the idea that popular demand combined with technology advances could drive widespread diffusion of an Internet of Things that could, like the present Internet, contribute invaluably to economic development [1]. The LPWA market has existed for about 10 years; it’s not a new thing. The current technologies (solutions) supporting this market are fragmented and non-standardized, therefore there are shortcomings like poor reliability, poor security, high operational and maintenance costs. Furthermore, the new overlay network deployment is complex. The increased spread of Internet of Things (IoT) is leading to a deep process of change in all aspects of the everyday life. The aim is to blur the boundaries between digital and physical world, creating a wide network of connected devices, endowed with artificial intelligence [2]. NB-IoT is the newest specification of LTE (Long term Evolution) released by the 13th 3GPP. Where this protocol can overcome the problem of coordinating the wireless sensor network warmth which is massive that blocked by distance. 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 [3]. NB-IOT, with all the advantages like wide area ubiquitous coverage, fast upgrade of existing network, low-power consumption guaranteeing 10 year battery life, high coupling, low cost terminal, plug and play, high reliability and high carrier-class network security, unified business platform management. Initial network investment may be quite substantial and superimposed costs are very little. NB-IOT perfectly matches LPWA market requirements, enabling operators to enter this new field. NB-IOT enables operators to operate traditional businesses such as Smart Metering, Tracking, by virtue of ultra-low-cost ($ 5 ) modules  and super connectivity (50K / Cell),  also opens up more industry opportunities, for example, Smart City, eHealth [4].

2.         METHODOLOGY

I made this review based on the journal I searched with research from 2016 to 2018 with reference sources from IEEE explore and the journal vendor NB-IoT device. The author uses the keywords "Internet of Things", "NB-IoT", "Wireless Sensor Network Communication Using NB-IoT" and "NB-IoT Products". By using these keywords the author gets information about the extent of the development of NB-IoT technology as a method in reviewing this paper.

Figure 1. The process flow for literature search

Figure 1. Shows the order of the authors to review the journal paper. It starts with collecting as many journals as 33 keywords that have been searched. Then the journal is filtered again by reading the abstract and conclusions from the journal to find out the essence of the filtered journal discussion into 22. Then as many as 16 filtered journals are read quickly with the aim of seeing interesting discussions about NB-IoT. The final step is to understand the entire contents of the journal for writing a paper review.

3.       RESULT and ANALYSIS

3.1. Search Result

The various journals published that I reviewed between 2016 and 2018 were studies originating from various countries including Italia [2], Spain [5] [6], Denmark [7], China [8] and also Saudi Arabia [9]. This research was also carried out by major telecommunications equipment vendors in the world such as Vodafone[10] , Nokia [11] and Huawei [4].

3.2. Study Focus

Research carried out mostly on the characteristics and implementation of the NB-IoT protocol. The implementation of the use of NB-IoT itself is utilized in making products produced by the leading telecommunication vendors in the world. In addition, the papers I reviewed here refer to the extent to which the NB-IoT protocol is implemented in the industrial sector, of course.

3.3. Internet of Things

IoT refers to the interconnection between various objects that can communicate among each other with minimal need for human supervision. Due to the rapid advances in the field of underlying technologies, IoT has tremendous opportunities in several different areas such as security, asset tracking, remote monitoring, metering (gas, water and electric) and smart grid to name a few [12]. The IoT empowers substantial objects to see, hear, think and per- form jobs by having them “talk” with each, to share information and to synchronize pronouncements. The IoT transforms these objects from being conventional to smart by manipulating its underlying technologies such as omnipresent and pervasive computing, embedded devices, communication technologies, sensor networks, protocols and applications [13]

3.4. LTE

Several releases of LTE have provided progressively improved support for low-power wide-area IoT connectivity. In Long Term Evolution (LTE) Rel-12, support for low-cost devices with material cost comparable to General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) devices was introduced. In LTE Rel-13, two new features have been introduced to support narrowband machine type communications (MTC). For the first feature, called enhanced MTC (eMTC), a new UE category with reduced radio frequency (RF) bandwidth of 1.4 MHz is introduced. The system operates in-band as part of the wideband LTE carrier. Coverage enhancement, providing improved indoor support, is also introduced in eMTC [14].

3.5. NB-IoT

NB-IoT reuses Long Term Evolution functionality with simplifications and optimizations. Particularly for small data transmissions, NB-IoT specifies two procedures to reduce the required signaling: one of them based on the control plane and the other on the user plane (UP) [3]. In contrast to eMTC, NB-IoT is a new system built from existing LTE functionalities. NB-IoT has been designed with the following objectives :

•  Ultra-low complexity device to support IoT applications.
•  
•  Improved indoor coverage of 20 dB compared to legacy GPRS, corresponding to a Maximum Coupling Loss (MCL) of 164 dB while supporting a data rate of at least 160 bps at the application layer.
•  Support of massive number of low-throughput device at least 52547 device within a cell-site sector.
• Improved power efficiency-battery life of ten years with battery capacity of 5 Watt.
•  Exception report latency of 10 seconds or less is the requirement for 99% of the devices.

In addition to the performance objectives, a compatibility objective also requires that NB-IoT system should avoid negative impacts to legacy 3GPP cellular systems that are deployed in the same frequency band and should adhere to regulatory requirements [14].  NB-IoT has reportedly found applications not only in traditional businesses (for example, wireless sensor networks, Smart Metering and Tracking, but also in many emerging industries such as smart cities and eHealth. In this section, a framework for NB-IoT applications based on the system designed. This framework consists of four components: NB-IoT terminal, receiver and data transmission network, NB-IoT cloud platform and application server. Various NB-IoT terminals (e.g., Lights smart, water / gas meter, trash can, etc.) Connected to a set of NB devices, which will send data that depends on the application to the cellular base station.The data is then forwarded to the NB-IoT cloud platform, which will forward data to a particular application server Obviously, that will greatly reduce the development costs for an application [15].

Figure 2. NB-IoT application architecture [15]

4.      DISCUSSION

As new technology develops, there are still some points that must be considered and investigated, such as the benefits and impacts on the surrounding environment in its application. The parameters used are performance analysis, optimization design, combination with other technologies, and implementation and application [8]

Table 1. Performance for Downlink  in  NB-IOT [8]

Table 2. Performance for Uplink in NB-IOT [8]

In relatively new equipment station, the NB-IoT can be implemented through software upgrade. However, old devices may be unable to support LTE and NB-IoT simultaneously, therefore hardware upgrade is required. In this case, if current unit stations are upgraded to NB- oT step by step, the NB-IoT implementation can be also made stage by stage without  simultaneous hardware upgrade at all stations. Therefore, the NB-IoT can be upgraded gradually until all stations are fully upgraded. Moreover, the NB-IoT module can be deployed into the LTE core network step by step, which will fully support all network services such as identify verification, security, strategy, tracking, charging and etc [9].

In order to support both CP and UP optimizations, LTE’s network requires some functionality modifcations. In this section, we list the most relevant modifications of each optimization. Note that network slicing may be an interesting solution to enable the introduction of these modifcations and therefore facilitate the support of mMTC over a common network infrastructure [6]. Measured data show how the technical features of NBIoT technology allow a mobile operator to serve customers with this new functionality without the need for installing new network equipment, and reusing the pre-existing portion of spectrum dedicated to LTE, while maintaining the fairness with this technology [2]. Specifically, in the designed system, sensing and communication modules are integrated into an NB device. The sensing data are collected and transmitted to an IoT cloud platform, which then pushes the received data to the application server built for each application. The IoT platform can be either

a commercial platform, such as Huawei cloud platform or China Mobile One Net, or designed, built and maintained by end users. In our design, we use the Huawei cloud platform named Ocean Connect. The user app is used to connect users and application server, or request real-time data from NB devices via cloud platform. Since it is easy to develop the user app and application server (many companies provide such a tailored development service), we focus on the technical part of the system, that is, the design of development board for NB devices, firmware design and implementation to enable data sensing, computing and communication, cloud service configuration [15]. According to GSMA [16], totally seven categories and 24 cases are identified for the potential LPWA solutions, as depicted in Fig. 3. Among them, we find out that NB-IoT has been deployed in some key applications such as smart parking, smart waste, smart street lamp, environmental monitoring, VIP tracking, smart bike sharing, container tracking and smart metering, but it is still far from the large-scale deployments. Although it can be attributed to many reasons, our insights are two-folds: one is due to the comparatively higher chipset prices, and another is due to some intrinsic limitations in the standard [8].

Figure 3. Seven categories and 24 applications for LPWA scenarios identified by GSMA. The solid circle means that there are already NB-IoT solutions for [8]

5.      CONCLUSION

In the discussion of this review paper the authors found that the NB-IoT provides a fairly comprehensive evaluation of its performance as the latest product and technology from 3GPP. NB-IoT is a new radio technology that coexists with existing GSM, UMTS and LTE systems [5]. [11] provides an overview of NB-IoT and discusses the design targets of NB-IoT include low-cost devices, high coverage (20dB improvement over GPRS), long device battery life (more than 10 years), and massive capacity. Our results show that the targets can be achieved in all deployment scenarios. The specifications offered by NB-IoT are quite promising, but in terms of NB-IoT data rates occupy 160 ~ 250 kbps which is greater than the previous superior product, LoRa which has a data rate value of  <50 bps [15]. That doesn't really affect the selling value and quality of NB-IoT products. With the many products listed in the paper [8] the products that are created are very beneficial for human life and the authors want to convey is that of the many products produced with the combination of NB-IoT there is no product to facilitate public transportation safety support devices, if this is realized the government will be very helped by this products.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The writing of this review paper was supported by Mr. Sidiq Syamsul Hidayat as the lecturer in the Research Methodology course. Thanks to him for supporting and helping in correcting the manuscript.

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