Efficient Preamble Detection and Time-of-Arrival Estimation for Single-Tone Frequency Hopping Random Access in NB-IoT

The narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT) standard is a new cellular wireless technology, which has been introduced by the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) with the goal to connect massive low-cost, low-complexity and long-life IoT devices with extended coverage. In order to improve power efficiency, 3GPP proposed a new random access (RA) waveform for NB-IoT based on a single-tone frequency-hopping scheme. RA handles the first connection between user equipments (UEs) and the base station (BS). Through this, UEs can be identified and synchronized with the BS. In this context, receiver methods for the detection of the new waveform should satisfy the requirements on the successful user detection as well as the timing synchronization accuracy. This is not a trivial task, especially in the presence of radio impairments like carrier frequency offset (CFO) which constitutes one of the main radio impairments besides the noise. In order to tackle this problem, we propose a new receiver method for NB-IoT physical RA channel (NPRACH). The method is designed to eliminate perfectly the CFO without any additional computational complexity and supports all NPRACH preamble formats. The associated performance has been evaluated under 3GPP conditions. We observe a very high performance compared both to 3GPP requirements and to the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of detection accuracy and complexity.