Optimization of Random Access Channel in NB-IoT

Narrowband Internet of Things is a new access technology introduced by 3GPP. This paper presents an analytical model to estimate the access success probability and average access delay of the random access channels by considering maximum number of preamble transmissions, size of backoff windows, and number of subcarriers in each coverage enhancement levels. A joint optimization technique is proposed to configure the parameters to maximize the access success probability under a target delay constraint. The accuracy of the analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed optimization technique are verified by computer simulations and benchmarked with exhaustive search. The result shows that the proposed optimization is able to find the optimal configuration under various conditions.