Radio Resource Management Scheme in NB-IoT Systems

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is the prominent technology that fits the requirements of future IoT networks. However, due to the limited spectrum (i.e., 180 kHz) availability for NB-IoT systems, one of the key issues is how to efficiently use these resources to support massive IoT devices? Furthermore, in NB-IoT, to reduce the computation complexity and to provide coverage extension, the concept of time offset and repetition has been introduced. Considering these new features, the existing resource management schemes are no longer applicable. Moreover, the allocation of frequency band for NB-IoT within LTE band, or as a standalone, might not be synchronous in all the cells, resulting in intercell interference (ICI) from the neighboring cells’ LTE users or NB-IoT users (synchronous case). In this paper, first a theoretical framework for the upper bound on the achievable data rate is formulated in the presence of control channel and repetition factor. From the conducted analysis, it is shown that the maximum achievable data rates are 89.2 Kbps and 92 Kbps for downlink and uplink, respectively. Second, we propose an interference aware resource allocation for NB-IoT by formulating the rate maximization problem considering the overhead of control channels, time offset, and repetition factor. Due to the complexity of finding the globally optimum solution of the formulated problem, a sub-optimal solution with an iterative algorithm based on cooperative approaches is proposed. The proposed algorithm is then evaluated to investigate the impact of repetition factor, time offset and ICI on the NB-IoT data rate, and energy consumption. Furthermore, a detailed comparison between the non-cooperative, cooperative, and optimal scheme (i.e., no repetition) is also presented. It is shown through the simulation results that the cooperative scheme provides up to 8% rate improvement and 17% energy reduction as compared with the non-cooperative scheme.