An Efficient Small Data Transmission Scheme in the 3GPP NB-IoT System

This letter proposes an efficient small data transmission scheme in the narrow band (NB)-Internet of Things (IoT) system. For the efficient use of radio resources, the proposed scheme enables devices in an idle state to transmit a small data packet without the radio resource control connection setup process. This can improve the maximum number of supportable devices in the NB-IoT system which has insufficient radio resources. Numerical results have shown that the proposed scheme can increase the maximum number of supportable devices by about 60% compared with the conventional scheme.