Module 2 - NB-IoT

By
Nex-G Innovations - NESPL

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This section presents the design of Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT).

The first part of this section describes the background behind the introduction of NB-IoT
in the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) specifications and the design
principles of the technology.

What motivated 3GPP to embark on the standardization of yet a third cellular IoT
technology, despite the on-going activities of specifying both Extended Coverage Global
System for Mobile Communications Internet of Things (EC-GSM-IoT) and Long-Term
Evolution for Machine-Type Communications (LTE-M)? Extended Coverage
The first IoT technology is Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT), which is great for IoT devices that need to send tiny amounts of data incidentally. The main benefits of NB-IoT are energy
efficiency and low power consumption.

https://euristiq.com/types-of-iot-networks/

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The second part of this section focuses on the physical channels with an emphasis on
how these channels are designed to fulfill the objectives that NB-IoT is intended to
achieve, namely, deployment flexibility, ubiquitous coverage, ultra-low device cost, long
battery lifetime, and capacity sufficient for supporting a massive number of devices in a
cell.

Detailed descriptions are provided regarding both downlink and uplink transmission
schemes and how each of the NB-IoT physical channels is mapped to radio resources
in both the frequency and time dimensions.

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The third part of this section covers NB-IoT idle and connected mode procedures and
the transition between these modes, including all activities from initial cell selection to
completing a data transfer.
IDLE MODE :

The idle mode procedures include the initial cell selection, which is the procedure that a
device has to go through when it is first switched on or is attempting to select a new cell
to camp on.

Idle mode activities also include paging and acquisition of Master and System
Information Blocks.

After the idle mode procedures, the transition from idle to connected mode is described
in a set of system access procedures.
CONNECTED MODE :

Then, descriptions of some fundamental connected mode procedures including

scheduling, power control, and multicarrier operation are presented.

Finally, a summary of the most recent improvements accomplished in Release 14 of the

3GPP specifications is presented.

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Some examples of current LPWAN applications are the following:
Smart metering (connected utility meters: sensors in basements).
Smart parking (connected parking lots: sensors in the ground and basement garages).
Smart waste management (connected municipal trash cans).
NB-IOT - 3GPP STANDARDIZATION
Asset tracking (such as countrywide tracking and tracing of cargo carriers like pallet cages, pallets, and containers).
Connected buildings (sensors in bridges or tunnels measure temperature, humidity and corrosion and identify vulnerabilities long before visible damage occurs).
Condition monitoring (sensors in construction machinery and vehicles recognize malfunctions or theft).
In early 2015, the market for Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) was rapidly
developing.

Sigfox was building out their Ultra Narrowband Modulation networks in France, Spain,
the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

The LoRa Alliance, founded with a clear ambition to provide IoT connectivity with wide-
area coverage, released LoRaWAN R1.0 specification in June 2015.

The Alliance at that point quickly gathered significant industry interest and strong
membership growth.

Up until then, Global System for Mobile Communications/General Packet Radio Service
(GSM/GPRS) had been the main cellular technology of choice for serving wide-area IoT
use cases, thanks to it being a mature technology with low modem cost (at least when
compared with 3G and 4G).

This position was challenged by the emerging LPWAN technologies that presented an
alternative technology choice to many of the IoT verticals served by GSM/GPRS.

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Anticipating the new competition, 3GPP started a feasibility study on Cellular System
Support for Ultra-low Complexity and Low Throughput Internet of Things, referred to as
the Cellular IoT study for short in the following sections.

As explained challenging objectives on coverage, capacity, and battery lifetime were set
up, together with a more relaxed objective of a maximum system latency.

All these performance objectives offer major improvements over GSM and GPRS, as
specified at that time, toward better serving the IoT verticals.

One additional objective was that it should be possible to introduce the IoT features to
the existing GSM networks through software upgrade.

Building out a national network takes many years and requires substantial investment
up front.

With software upgrade, however, the well-established cellular network can be upgraded
overnight to meet all the key performance requirements of the IoT market.

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Among the solutions proposed to the Cellular IoT study, some were backward
compatible with GSM/GPRS and were developed based on the evolution of the existing
GSM/GPRS specifications.
Extended Coverage

EC-GSM-IoT is the solution eventually standardized in 3GPP Release 13.

Historically, the group carrying out the study, 3GPP TSG GERAN (Technical
Specifications Group GSM/EDGE Radio Access Network), had focused on the evolution
of GSM/GPRS technologies, developing features for meeting the need of GSM
operators.

Certain GSM operators, however, at that point considered refarming their GSM
spectrum to Long-Term Evolution (LTE) as well as to LPWAN dedicated for IoT services.

This consideration triggered the study on none GSM backward compatible

technologies, referred to as clean-slate solutions.

Although none of the clean-slate solutions in the study were specified, it provided a firm
ground for the NB-IoT technology that emerged after study completion and was
standardized in 3GPP Release 13.

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The entire NB-IoT system is supported in a bandwidth of 180 kHz, for each of the
downlink and uplink.

This allows for deployment in refarmed GSM spectrum as well as within an LTE carrier.

NB-IoT is part of the 3GPP LTE specifications and employs many technical components
already defined for LTE.

This approach reduced the standardization process and leveraged the LTE eco-system
to ensure a fast time-to-market.

It also possibly allows NB-IoT to be introduced through a software upgrade of the

existing LTE networks.

The normative work of developing the core specifications of NB-IoT took only a few
months and was completed in June 2016.

Then, within a year from the completion of the core specifications, mobile network
operators and technology vendors have been launching NB-IoT commercial networks
and devices.

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RADIO ACCESS DESIGN PRINCIPLES

NB-IoT is designed for ultra-low-cost massive Machine-Type Communications, aiming to

support a massive number of devices in a cell.

Low device complexity is one of the main design objectives, enabling low module cost.

It is designed to offer substantial coverage improvements over GPRS as well as for

enabling long battery lifetime.

NB-IoT has been designed to give maximal deployment flexibility.

In this section, we will highlight the design principles adopted in NB-IoT to achieve these
objectives.

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Low Device Complexity and Cost

Device modem complexity and cost are primarily related to the complexity of baseband
processing, memory consumption, and radio-frequency (RF) requirements.

Regarding baseband processing, NB-IoT is designed for allowing low-complexity

receiver processing during initial cell selection and during connection.

For initial cell selection, a device needs to search for only one synchronization sequence
for establishing basic time and frequency synchronization to the network.

The device can use a low sampling rate (e.g., 240 kHz) and take advantage of the
synchronization sequence properties to minimize memory and complexity.

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During connected mode, low device complexity is facilitated by restricting the DL

transport block size (TBS) to be no larger than 680 bits in Release 13 and relaxing the
processing time requirements compared with LTE.

For channel coding, instead of using the LTE turbo code, which requires iterative
receiver processing, NB-IoT adopts a simple convolutional code, i.e., the LTE tail-biting
convolution code (TBCC), in the DL channels.

NB-IoT does not use higher-order modulations or multilayer multiple-input multiple-

output transmissions.

A device needs to support only half-duplex operation and is not required to listen to the
DL, while transmitting in the UL, and vice versa.

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Regarding RF, all the performance objectives of NB-IoT can be achieved with one
transmit-and-receive antenna in the device.

That is, neither DL receiver diversity nor UL transmit diversity is required in the device.
NB-IoT is designed for allowing relaxed oscillator accuracy in the device.

For example, a device can achieve initial acquisition when its oscillator inaccuracy is as
large as 20 parts per million (ppm). very high accuracy

During a data session, the transmission scheme is designed for the device to easily
track its frequency drift. which transmission scheme can be used to track frequency drift.

Because a device is not required to simultaneously transmit and receive, a duplexer is

not needed in the RF front end of the device. what is a duplexer or what does a duplexer do?

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The maximum transmit power level of an NB-IoT device is either 20 or 23 dBm in

Release 13.

This allows on-chip integration of the power amplifier (PA), which can contribute to the
device cost reduction.

Economy of scale is yet another contributor to cost reduction.

Thanks to its deployment flexibility and low minimum system bandwidth requirement, it
is expected that NB-IoT will be made globally available in many networks.

This will help to increase the economy of scale of NB-IoT.

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Coverage Enhancement (CE)

balancing
Coverage Enhancement (CE) is mainly achieved by trading off data rate for coverage.

Like EC-GSMIoT and LTE-M, repetitions are used to ensure that devices in coverage
challenging locations can still have reliable communications with the network, although
at a reduced data rate.

NB-IoT has been designed to use a close to constant envelope waveform in the UL.
close to constant envelope waveform = ?

This is an important factor for devices in extreme coverage- and power-limited situations
because it minimizes the need to back off the output power from the maximum
configurable level.

Minimizing the power backoff helps preserve the best coverage possible for a given PA
PA = ?
capability.

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Long Device Battery Lifetime

Minimizing power backoff also gives rise to higher PA power efficiency, which helps
extend device battery lifetime.

Device battery lifetime, however, depends heavily on how the device behaves when it
does not have an active data session.

In most use cases, the device actually spends the vast majority of its lifetime in idle
mode as most of the IoT applications only require infrequent transmission of short
packets.

Traditionally, an idle device needs to monitor paging and perform mobility

measurements.

Although the energy consumption during idle mode is much lower compared with during
connected mode, further energy saving can be achieved by simply increasing the
periodicity between paging occasions or not requiring the device to monitor paging at all.

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3GPP Releases 12 and 13 introduced both extended Discontinuous Reception (eDRX)

and Power-Saving Mode (PSM) to support this type of operation and optimize device
power consumption.

In essence, a device can shut down its transceiver and only keep a basic oscillator
running for the sake of keeping a time reference to know when it should come out of the
PSM or eDRX.

The reachability during PSM is set by the Tracking Area Update (TAU) timer with the
maximum settable value exceeding 1 year.

eDRX can be configured with a DRX cycle just below 3 h.

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During these power-saving states, both device and network maintain device context,
saving the need for unnecessary signaling when the device comes back to connected
mode. What is device context and unnecessary signaling?

This optimizes the signaling and power consumption when making the transition from
idle to connected mode.
PSM AND EDRX? cDRX?

In addition to PSM and eDRX, NB-IoT also adopts connected mode DRX (cDRX) as a
major tool for achieving energy efficiency.

In Release 13, the cDRX cycles were extended from 2.56 to 10.24 s for NB-IoT
cDRX Cycles?

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Support of Massive Number of Devices

NB-IoT achieves high capacity in terms of number of devices that can be supported on
one single NB-IoT carrier. multiple devices can be supported on one single NB-IOT carrier?
Which scheme is spectral efficient transmission scheme?
This is made possible by introducing spectrally efficient transmission scheme in the UL
for devices in extreme coverage-limited situation.

Shannon’s well-known channel capacity theorem establishes a relationship between

bandwidth, power, and capacity in an additive white Gaussian noise channel as

where C is the channel capacity (bits/s), S is the received desired signal power, N is the
noise power, which is determined by the product of noise bandwidth (W) and one-sided
noise power spectral density (N0).
What does shannon's channel capacity theorem says?

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Relation b/w noise and signal bandwidth?

The noise bandwidth is identical to the signal bandwidth if Nyquist pulse shaping
function is used. Nyquist pulse shaping function?

At extreme coverage-limited situation, S/N << 1:

Using the approximation ln(1 þ x) ≈ x, for x <<1, it can be shown that the channel
capacity in very low Signal-to-Noise-power Ratio (SNR) regime is

Relation b/w channel capacity and SNR?

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In this regime, the bandwidth dependency vanishes, and therefore channel capacity, in
terms of bits per second, is only determined by the ratio of S and N0.
What is S and N0?

Thus, in theory the coverage for a target data rate R = C depends only on the received
signal power level and not on the signal bandwidth. R=C ?

This implies that because the data rate at extreme coverage-limited situation does not
scale according to the device bandwidth allocation, for the sake of spectral efficiency, it
is advantageous to allocate small bandwidth for devices in bad coverage.

NB-IoT UL waveforms include various bandwidth options.

What is waveform how does it provides bandwidth options?
While a waveform of wide bandwidth (e.g., 180 kHz) is beneficial for devices in good
coverage, waveforms of small bandwidths are more spectrally efficient from the system
point of view for serving devices in bad coverage.
How wide bandwidth is beneficial in good coverage?

Wavelength of small bandwidth are more spectrally efficient for devices in bad coverage,how?

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Deployment Flexibility

To support maximum flexibility of deployment and prepare for refarming scenarios, NB-
IoT supports three modes of operation:-
• Stand-alone
• In-band
• Guard-band.

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Stand-alone Mode of Operation

NB-IoT may be deployed as a stand-alone carrier using any available spectrum with
bandwidth larger than 180 kHz.

This is referred to as the stand-alone deployment.

A use case of the stand-alone deployment is for a GSM operator to deploy NB-IoT in its
GSM band by refarming part of its GSM spectrum.

In this case, however, additional guard-band is needed between a GSM carrier and the
NB-IoT carrier.

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Based on the coexistence requirements, 200 kHz guard-band is recommended,

which means that a GSM carrier should be left empty on one side of an NB-IoT carrier
between two operators.

In case of the same operator deploying both GSM and NB-IoT, a guard-band of 100 kHz
is recommended based on the studies, and hence an operator needs to refarm at least
two consecutive GSM carriers for NB-IoT deployment.

An example is illustrated in Figure (NB-IoT stand-alone deployment using refarmed

GSM spectrum).

Here, NBIoT bandwidth is shown as 200 kHz.

This is because that NB-IoT needs to meet the GSM spectral mask when deployed
using refarmed GSM spectrum.

The GSM spectral mask is specified according to 200 kHz channelization.

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NB-IoT stand-alone deployment using refarmed GSM spectrum.

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In-Band and Guard-Band Modes of Operation

NB-IoT is also designed to be possible for deployment in the existing LTE networks,
either using one of the LTE Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs) or using the LTE guard-
band.

These two deployment scenarios are referred to as in-band and guard-band

deployments, respectively.

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An example is illustrated in Figure (NB-IoT deployment inside an LTE carrier).

An LTE carrier with a number of PRBs is shown.

NB-IoT can be deployed using one LTE PRB or using the unused bandwidth in the
guard-band.

The guard-band deployment makes use of the fact that the occupied bandwidth of the
LTE signal is roughly 90% of channel bandwidth when the LTE carrier bandwidth is 3, 5,
10, 15, or 20 MHz.

Hence, there is roughly 5% of the LTE channel bandwidth on each side available as
guard-band.

Yet another possible deployment scenario is to have NB-IoT in-band deployment on an

LTE carrier that supports LTE-M features.

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Some of these LTE-M narrowbands (NB) are not used for transmitting LTE-M System
Information Block Type 1 (SIB1) and thus can be used for deploying NB-IoT.

NB-IoT deployment inside an LTE carrier, either using one of the LTE PRBs (in-band deployment) or using
the LTE guard-band (guard-band deployment).

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Spectrum Refarming

NB-IoT is intended to offer flexible spectrum migration possibilities to a GSM operator.

An operator can take an initial step to refarm a small part of the GSM spectrum to NB-
IoT as the example shown in the top part of next Figure

Thanks to the support of LTE in-band and guard-band deployment, such an initial
migration step will not result in spectrum fragmentation to make the eventual migration
of the entire GSM spectrum to LTE more difficult.

As illustrated in next Figure, the NB-IoT carrier already deployed in the GSM network as
a stand-alone deployment may become an LTE in-band or guardband deployment when
the entire GSM spectrum is migrated to LTE.

This high flexibility is also expected to secure NB-IoT deployments when LTE is later on
refarmed to 5G.

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Partial GSM spectrum to NB-IoT introduction as an initial spectrum refarming step, followed by eventual total migration to LTE

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