NB-IoTtalk: A Service Platform for Fast Development of NB-IoT Applications

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is considered as a promising wireless communications technology for Internet of Things (IoT) especially for the outdoor environment. Many outdoor IoT applications involve large numbers of homogeneous NB-IoT devices. It is tedious to specify and accommodate these devices during application development. To resolve this issue, this paper proposes a service platform for fast development of NB-IoT applications called NB-IoTtalk. This platform utilizes a tag mechanism to provide an easy-to-manipulate graphical user interface to accommodate a large number of NB-IoT devices in an application and transparently show them in a visual map. Our approach automatically creates and parses the device profile used to interpret the payload of an NB-IoT message. We then use a smart parking lot application as an example to investigate the event-triggered reporting of NB-IoT in terms of the time-to-live (TTL) report frequency and the outage detection accuracy. This paper provides the guidelines to set the TTL interval for event-triggered NB-IoT applications.