Coverage and Deployment Analysis of Narrowband Internet of Things in the Wild

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is gaining momentum as a promising technology for massive machine type communication. Given that its deployment is rapidly progressing worldwide, measurement campaigns and performance analyses are needed to better understand the system and move toward its enhancement. With this aim, this article presents a large-scale measurement campaign and empirical analysis of NB-IoT on operational networks, and discloses valuable insights in terms of deployment strategies and radio coverage performance. The reported results also serve as examples showing the potential usage of the collected dataset, which we make open source along with a lightweight data visualization platform.