Successive Interference Cancellation for the NB-IoT Uplink Multiple Access

In the lowest complexity and consumption configuration, the narrow-band Internet of things (NB-IoT) standard is sensitive to hardware imperfections and interference from LTE users, due to the lost of orthogonality between the subcarriers. The interference from other LTE users is particularly harmful due to the low power decay of the leakage in the frequency domain and the fact that LTE received signals might have higher power than that of NB-IoT. In this paper, we provide measurement results that validate the interference leakage predicted by simulations. Additionally, we propose a successive interference cancellation (SIC) algorithm that is able to remove the interference and is robust to differences between the power of the received signals.