A Survey on NB-IoT Random Access: Approaches for Uplink Radio Access Network Congestion Management

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is one of the most promising technologies for enabling reliable communication among low-power, and low cost devices present in massive machine-type communications (mMTC). In NB-IoT, random access (RA) is implemented in the medium access control (MAC) layer to resolve access contention among massive IoT devices. Efficient network access techniques are required to effectively solve the massive access issues in NB-IoT, guaranteeing increased throughput and high spectrum utilization. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of NB-IoT towards supporting mMTC, with focus on the NB-IoT coexistence with 5G, as well the design challenges and requirements of RA in NB-IoT. Moreover, available literature is reviewed to highlight the RA congestion control schemes proposed during the past few years to alleviate RA collisions. While existing RA approaches mainly focus on conventional contention-based techniques for performing RA, intelligent learning based and grant-free Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) have been identified as a potential candidates to increase the transmission efficiency of mMTC applications.