Empirical Test for Coverage Evaluation of NB-IoT Network

In recent years several Internet of Things(IoT) technologies are being developed covering different aspects and sets of applications. One of such technology, proposed by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is called as Nar-roBand IoT (NB-IoT). NB-IoT is based on 3GPP’s existing LTE standard with special features added to support the Low Power Wide Area Network(LPWAN) devices. Some of the NB-IoT features include low power consumption, low cost, deep-indoor coverage (20dB improvement over standard LTE), massive device connectivity, etc. In this paper, we have evaluated performance of an commercially deployed NB-IoT network from a prospective of smart building & smart city applications. In order to achieve this goal, we performed two sets of tests. The first test focused on measuring the maximum distance covered by a single NB-IoT cell in a given area. The second test included measuring the signal strength when the device was placed in an indoor, outdoor, and deep-indoor locations. Theses tests were conducted in the campus of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and neighbouring residential area. The results for the tests were obtained by sending approximately 300 packets from each location to a cloud solution.