ADAM: An Adaptive Access Mechanism for NB-IoT Systems in the 5G Era

The technology of Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is expected to contribute towards the support of massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC), i.e., one of the fundamental performance objectives of 5G networks. However, that call for massiveness, requests a thorough revisit on the NB-IoT access procedure. Considering this, the performance of the NB-IoT access procedure is analysed under different network densities and for various combinations of the related configuration parameters. The analysis led to a useful reference table with 3GPP compliant configurations that maximize the access success probability in an NB-IoT system. The table enables an adaptive access mechanism, where the access parameters are adjusted according to the expected network density. The evaluation results quantify the gain that adaptiveness can provide to the performance of the access procedure.