Radio Resource Scheduling for Narrowband Internet of Things Systems: A Performance Study

In the context of the IoT, mMTC technology in 5G enables a range of new applications. The 3GPP NB-IoT introduced in Release 13 is a major enhancement toward mMTC to support devices requiring low data rate, low cost, and long battery life. Previous works suggested that NB-IoT physical channel characteristics have potential to fulfill design requirements. From the system point of view, the interaction among UEs and application data transmission procedures have to be further evaluated considering radio resource scheduling. In this article, we identify radio resource scheduling issues for NB-IoT systems and provide a comprehensive performance evaluation. We consider control plane optimization procedures with a massive number of UEs in mixed CE levels. Using a scheduling architecture verified with derived effective data rates, we show the effects of essential parameters on control channel allocation and data scheduling. Given our scheduling settings in anchor carriers, the number of transmitted data packets achieves about 65,000 per cell per hour with mixed CE levels. The results satisfy the design goal of NB-IoT data transmission in 3GPP TR 45.820.