An Open Source Platform for Exploring NB-IoT System Performance

Applications and services emerged in the Internet of Things era are introducing new challenging requirements to the current communication technologies. Since a high number of devices are intentioned to sporadically send small data packets, the transmission speed goes at a secondary level of importance. Instead, more attention is devoted to coverage, computational complexity, and energy constraints. In this context, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project is complementing existing mobile systems with a novel technology, namely NarrowBand Internet of Things (NB-IoT), which is expected to be more suitable for Internet of Things scenarios. While it is getting more and more attention from academia and industry, there is an increasing need to have flexible instruments for designing and testing protocols and algorithms for the NB-IoT stack. To this end, the work discussed herein proposes an open source simulator for NB-IoT, conceived starting from the well-known LTE-Sim tool. At the present stage, it implements uplink transmission with both Single-Tone and Multi-Tone configurations, random access procedure, and baseline scheduling, while offering the support for multi carrier, stand alone, in band, and guard band operating modes. The tool has been used for evaluating the performance of reference NB-IoT scenarios. Obtained results highlight the impact of traffic load and system configurations on network performance.