Prototyping of Open Source NB-IoT Network

Narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT) is one of the major access technologies proposed to support massive machine type communications (mMTC) services for the 5^th generation (5G) mobile networks. Many emerging services and networking paradigms are expected to be developed on top of NB-IoT networks. This paper summarizes the steps required to build up an open source narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT) network. This work is a joint research and development (R&D) result from industry and academic collaboration. The open source NB-IoT enhanced Node B (eNB) is jointly developed by EURECOM, B-COM and NTUST based on the well-known OpenAirInterface™ (OAI) open source Long-Term Evolution (LTE) eNB. The NB-IoT eNB is successfully connected to an evolved packet core (EPC) developed by Nokia Bell Lab. We demonstrate how to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) NB-IoT module to forward its sensing data to the Internet via the open source NB-IoT network.