Avaliação de desempenho de técnicas de alocação de recursos de rádio para comunicações máquina-à-máquina em redes narrowband IoT

Abstract

The expectations for the scenario of 5G internet show that the Internet of Things (IoT) environment will amount to a large share of the data traffic. This category of traffic, known as Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, is expected to have a different behaviour when compared to conventional applications. These applications contrast in the direction of the traffic, data volume and the amount of devices per wireless cell. While conventional applications are dominated by large downloads being done by a smaller amount of devices, and these applications are mainly constituted by a larger amount of devices making upload transmissions of small amounts of data. Because of that, multiple technologies are being developed right now to ensure the requirements of this variety of applications. One of these technologies is known as NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT), which is defined as a feature of the renown standard for cellular networks Limited Term Evolution (LTE). The major advantage of NB-IoT over its competitors is the reuse of some of the protocol stack and all the hardware of common LTE networks. That means that this new standard inherits the advantages of the well developed LTE protocols and there is no requirement of new hardware. But the major feature of NB-IoT that allows the deployment of a massive amount of end devices per NB-IoT carrier is the employment of single-tone and multitone transmissions. These two kinds of transmissions are split into 5 different configurations, each with different characteristics of channel occupation, time duration and channel multiplexing. We investigate each of these configurations with M2M traffic. This allows the proposal of a dynamic resource allocation strategy for NB-IoT carriers. Our results show that the NB-IoT standard is feasible for M2M networks, especially in scenarios with multiple carriers. We also see that multiple NB-IoT carriers can be deployed on a single LTE carrier without significant effect. Lastly, it is shown that the static approach is better than the dynamic approach proposed. Which is due to the superior performance of the we confront the behaviour of the static allocation of NB-IoT resources with the dynamic approach proposed in this work.