On Device Grouping for Efficient Multicast Communications in Narrowband-IoT

Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) is a new cellular network technology that has been designed for low capability, low power consumption devices that are expected to operate for more than 10 years on a single battery. These types of devices will be inexpensive (less than $5) and deployed on massive scales. This long life expectancy will lead to the need for occasional software updates, to very large groups of devices. While a new multicast mechanism has recently been proposed for the efficient multicast transmission of such updates, it assumes that devices can be grouped together and synchronized in order to receive the multicast data. In this paper, we explore three different approaches to achieve device grouping, with different trade-offs between bandwidth usage, energy consumption and compliance with the NB-IoT standard. To assess the performance of each pproach, we conducted a thorough experimental evaluation under realistic operating conditions.