Design, Key Techniques and System-Level Simulation for NB-IoT Networks

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a promising technology designated specially by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to meet the growing demand of massive machine-type communications (mMTC). More and more industrial companies choose NB-IoT network as the solution to mMTC due to its unique design and technical specification released by 3GPP. In order to evaluate the performance of NB-IoT network, we design a system-level simulation for NB-IoT network in this paper. In particular, the structure of system-level simulator are divided into four parts, i.e., initialization, pre-generation, main simulation loop and post-processing. Moreover, three key techniques are developed in the implementation of NB-IoT network by accounting for enhanced coverage, massive connection and low-power consumption. Simulation results demonstrate the cumulative distribution function curves of signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio are fully compliant with industrial standard, and the performance of throughput explains how NB-IoT network realize massive connection at the cost of data rate.