Clock Error Impact on NB-IoT Radio Link Performance

3GPP has recently addressed the improvements in Random Access Network (RAN) and specified some new technologies such as enhanced Machine Type Communication (eMTC) and Narrow Band – Internet of Things (NB-IoT) in its release 13 which is also known as LTE-Advanced Pro. These new technologies are addressed mainly to focus on development and deployment of cellular IoT services. NB-IoT is less complex and easily deployable through software upgradation and is compatible to legacy cellular networks such as GSM and 4G which makes it a suitable candidate for IoT. NB-IoT will greatly support LPWAN, thus, it can be deployed for Smart cities and other fields such as smart electricity, smart agriculture, smart health services and smart homes. The NB-IoT targets for low cost device, low power consumption, relaxed delay sensitivity and easy deployment which will greatly support above mentioned fields. This thesis work studies the clock error impact on the radio link performance for up-link transmission on the NB-IoT testbed based on Cloud-RAN using Software Defined Radios (SDR) on a LTE protocol stack. The external clock error is introduced to the network and performance issues are analyzed in the radio link. The analysis indicates packet drops up to 51% in the radio link through the study of received power, packet loss, retransmissions, BLER and SINR for different MCS index. The major performance issues depicted by the analysis are packet loss up to 51% and retransmission of packets up to 128 times for lower SINR and high clock errors. Also, clock errors produce CFO up to 1.25 ppm which results in bad synchronization between UE and eNodeB

Looking at NB-IoT over LEO Satellite Systems: Design and Evaluation of a Service-Oriented Solution

The adoption of the NB-IoT technology in satellite communications intends to boost Internet of Things services beyond the boundaries imposed by the current terrestrial infrastructures. Apart from link-level studies in the scientific literature and preliminary 3GPP technical reports, the overall debate is still open. To provide a further step forward in this direction, the work presented herein pursues a novel service-oriented methodology to design an effective solution, meticulously stitched around application requirements and technological constraints. To this end, it conducts link-level and system-level investigations to tune physical transmissions, satellite constellation, and protocol architecture, while ensuring the expected system behavior. To offer a real smart agriculture service operating in Europe, the resulting solution exploits 24 Low Earth Orbit satellites, grouped into 8 different orbits, moving at an altitude of 500 km. The configured protocol stack supports the transmission of tens of bytes generated at the application layer, by also counteracting the issues introduced by the satellite link. Since each satellite has the whole protocol stack on-board, terminals can transmit data without the need for the feeder link. This ensures communication latencies ranging from 16 minutes to 75 minutes, depending on the served number of terminals and the physical transmission settings. Moreover, the usage of the Early Data Transmission scheme reduces communication latencies up to 40%. These results pave the way towards the deployment of an effective proof-of-concept, which drastically reduces the time-to-market imposed by the current state of the art

Multitone NB-IoT optimization based on filtered OFDM waveform

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is standardized by 3GPP as a novel radio-access scheme for next-generation IoT technology. In-band operation mode, as one of its deployment methods, shares the spectrum of LTE. To avoid interference leakage on adjacent resource blocks (RBs), the spectrum sharing system needs a spectrally well-localized waveform. In this thesis, we investigate filtered-OFDM waveform for NB-IoT in-band system. This is achieved by designing and exploiting optimized filter for each sub-band. Specifically, the optimum filter needs a suitable length, a relatively narrowed transition band, and adequate stopband attenuation, which efficiently reduces the required guard-band, minimizing the related overhead in resource usage. In the experiments, we simplify the system model by shifting the NB-IoT RB to the center of the LTE spectrum. Firstly, we test potential filter types with various transition bands, selecting suitable filter configurations with acceptable performance when the system operates under carrier frequency offset (CFO) of half subcarrier spacing. Then, we define two different power level test cases, which are based on the minimum SNR for 1% uncoded bit-error rate (BER), for examining NB-IoT and LTE error tolerance in asynchronous cases, when NB-IoT system fails to synchronize to the time-frequency alignment of LTE. Finally, the system performance in a multipath channel is evaluated. With filtered-OFDM, the out-of-band emission is suppressed effectively and the tolerance to time and frequency offset is significantly improved, which makes the proposed scheme suitable for supporting asynchronous NB-IoT operation

Efficient Preamble Detection and Time-of-Arrival Estimation for Single-Tone Frequency Hopping Random Access in NB-IoT

The narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) standard is a new cellular wireless technology, which has been introduced by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) with the goal to connect massive low-cost, low-complexity and long-life IoT devices with extended coverage. In order to improve power efficiency, 3GPP proposed a new Random Access (RA) waveform for NB-IoT based on a single-tone frequencyhopping scheme. RA handles the first connection between user equipments (UEs) and the base station (BS). Through this, UEs can be identified and synchronized with the BS. In this context, receiver methods for the detection of the new waveform should satisfy the requirements on the successful user detection as well as the timing synchronization accuracy. This is not a trivial task, especially in the presence of radio impairments like carrier frequency offset (CFO) which constitutes one of the main radio impairments besides the noise. In order to tackle this problem, we propose a new receiver method for NB-IoT Physical Random Access Channel (NPRACH). The method is designed to eliminate perfectly the CFO without any additional computational complexity and supports all NPRACH preamble formats. The associated performance has been evaluated under 3GPP conditions. We observe a very high performance compared both to 3GPP requirements and to the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of detection accuracy and complexity

Versatility Of Low-Power Wide-Area Network Applications

Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) is regarded as the leading communication technology for wide-area Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. It offers low-power, long-range, and low-cost communication. With different communication requirements for varying IoT applications, many competing LPWAN technologies operating in both licensed (e.g., NB-IoT, LTE-M, and 5G) and unlicensed (e.g., LoRa and SigFox) bands have emerged. LPWANs are designed to support applications with low-power and low data rate operations. They are not well-designed to host applications that involve high mobility, high traffic, or real-time communication (e.g., volcano monitoring and control applications).With the increasing number of mobile devices in many IoT domains (e.g., agricultural IoT and smart city), mobility support is not well-addressed in LPWAN. Cellular-based/licensed LPWAN relies on the wired infrastructure to enable mobility. On the other hand, most unlicensed LPWANs operate on the crowded ISM band or are required to duty cycle, making handling mobility a challenge. In this dissertation, we first identify the key opportunities of LPWAN, highlight the challenges, and show potential directions for future research. We then enable the versatility of LPWAN applications first by enabling applications involving mobility over LPWAN. Specifically, we propose to handle mobility in LPWAN over white space considering Sensor Network Over White Space (SNOW). SNOW is a highly scalable and energy-efficient LPWAN operating over the TV white spaces. TV white spaces are the allocated but locally unused available TV channels (54 - 698 MHz in the US). We proposed a dynamic Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) estimation and compensation technique that considers the impact of the Doppler shift due to mobility. Also, we design energy-efficient and fast BS discovery and association approaches. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach through experiments in different deployments. Finally, we present a collision detection and recovery technique called RnR (Reverse & Replace Decoding) that applies to LPWANs. Additionally, we discuss future work to enable handling burst transmission over LPWAN and localization in mobile LPWAN

Modelaçcão comportamental da camada física NB-IoT - Uplink

Mestrado em Engenharia Eletrónica e TelecomunicaçõesA Internet das Coisas (IoT) consiste numa rede sem fios de sensores/atuadores ligados entre si e que têm a capacidade de recolher dados. Devido ao crescimento rápido do mercado IoT, as redes de longa distância e baixa potência (LPWAN) tornaram-se populares. O NarrowBand-IoT (NB-IoT), desenvolvido pela 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), é um desses protocolos. O principal objectivo desta dissertação é a implementação de uma simulação comportamental em MATLAB do NB-IoT no uplink, que será disponibilizada abertamente. Esta será focada, primariamente, na camada física e nas suas respetivas funcionalidades, nomeadamente turbo coding, modulação SC-FDMA, modelos de simulação de canal, desmodulação SC-FDMA, estimação de canal, equalizador e turbo decoding. A estimação de canal é feita usando símbolos piloto previamente conhecidos. Os modelos de canal utilizados são baseados nas especificações oficiais da 3GPP. A taxa de bits errados (BER) é calculada e usada de forma a avaliar a performance do turbo encoder e do equalizador zero forcing (ZF). Serve também como comparação quando a implementação usa esquemas de modulação diferentes (Binary Phase-Shift Keying (BPSK) e Quadrature Phase-Shift Keying (QPSK)). Além disso, os sinais gerados em MATLAB são transmitidos usando como front-end de radio-frequência (RF) uma Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). Posteriormente, são recebidos, desmodulados e descodificados. Finalmente, é obtida a constelação do sinal, a BER é calculada e os resultados são analisados.The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a wireless network of interconnected sensors/actuators with data-collecting technologies. Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) have become popular due to the rapid growth of the IoT market. Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT), developed by 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), is one of these protocols. The main objective of this thesis is the implementation of an open-source uplink behavioral simulator based on MATLAB. Its focus is primarily on Layer 1 (physical layer) relevant functionalities, namely turbo coding, Single-Carrier Frequency-Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) modulation, channel modeling, SC-FDMA demodulation, channel estimation, equalization and turbo decoding. Channel estimation is performed using known pilot symbols. The used channel models are based on the 3GPP o cial release specs. The Bit Error Rate (BER) is calculated in order to evaluate the turbo encoder and the Zero Forcing (ZF) equalizer performance, and to compare Binary Phase-Shift Keying (BPSK) and Quadrature Phase-Shift Keying (QPSK) implementations. Furthermore, the MATLAB generated signal is transmitted using a radio-frequency (RF) front-end consisting of an Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). Afterwards, the signal is received, demodulated and decoded. A constellation is obtained, the BER is calculated and the results are analyzed

A Tutorial on Nonorthogonal Multiple Access for 5G and Beyond

Today's wireless networks allocate radio resources to users based on the orthogonal multiple access (OMA) principle. However, as the number of users increases, OMA based approaches may not meet the stringent emerging requirements including very high spectral efficiency, very low latency, and massive device connectivity. Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) principle emerges as a solution to improve the spectral efficiency while allowing some degree of multiple access interference at receivers. In this tutorial style paper, we target providing a unified model for NOMA, including uplink and downlink transmissions, along with the extensions tomultiple inputmultiple output and cooperative communication scenarios. Through numerical examples, we compare the performances of OMA and NOMA networks. Implementation aspects and open issues are also detailed.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figure

On feasibility of the UE power saving signal for the 5G new radio

Abstract. The objective of this thesis is to study and evaluate physical layer signals and channels to achieve the user equipment (UE) power saving in the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) new radio (NR). The fifth generation (5G) mobile network has strict objectives regarding power consumption and performance. The UE power consumption also has a big impact on the end user’s quality of experience (QoE) and future deployment of NR devices. Therefore, it is very important to study ways to reduce UE power consumption. One feasible power saving technique is the usage of so-called power saving signal or channel, which triggers the UE to transition to the active mode from the power saving mode. The first part of this work provides an overview of general properties of the NR and its physical downlink signals and channels, as well as the UE operation and power consumption in the connected mode. Then, examples of existing power saving techniques are discussed and a new scheme of the wake-up mechanism and the UE power saving signal/wake-up signal (WUS) is described. Lastly, different design options for the power saving signal are described and their detection performance is studied. The power saving signal options of this thesis can be divided into physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) based and sequence-based signals/channels. In the PDCCH based option, the power saving indication is carried as a payload of the PDCCH. Studied sequence-based options are the secondary synchronization signal (SSS), the PDCCH demodulation reference signal (DMRS), the channel state information reference signal (CSI-RS) and a UE-specific sequence that is mapped to all radio resources allocated for the PDCCH. The detection of the latter is done in time domain, and the detection of the other sequences is done in frequency domain. The detection performance of these signals/channels is compared based on link-level simulation results. Simulations were done with a Matlab-based simulator. They show the impact of the frequency- and time-selectivity and implementation impairments. Based on the numerical results, the impact of the UE speed up to 120 km/h and the carrier frequency offset (CFO) up to 400 Hz can be neglected with all the options except CSI-RS. It was shown that the sequence-based WUS options tend to suffer from the frequency-selective radio channel. By making decisions within the channel’s coherence bandwidth and using precoder cycling, the negative impact of the channel can be reduced. With these techniques, PDCCH DMRS outperforms all the other sequence-based options. However, in terms of detection performance, the PDCCH based power saving signal/channel is the most robust option of this set of candidates.Päätelaitteen virransäästösignaalin soveltuvuus 5G:n uuteen radiorajapintaan. Tiivistelmä. Tämän diplomityön tavoitteena on tutkia ja verrata fyysisen kerroksen signaaleja, päätelaitteen (user equipment, UE) virransäästön toteuttamiseksi 3GPP:n uudessa radiorajapinnassa (New Radio, NR). Viidennen sukupolven (5th generation, 5G) mobiiliverkolla on tiukat tavoitteet virransäästön ja suorituskyvyn osalta. Päätelaitteen virrankulutuksella on myös suuri vaikutus loppukäyttäjän kokemukseen ja tulevien NR-laitteiden käyttöönottoon. Siksi onkin erittäin tärkeää tutkia mahdollisia tapoja vähentää päätelaitteen virrankulutusta. Yksi mahdollinen virransäästötekniikka on niin sanottu virransäästösignaali, joka herättää päätelaitteen virransäästötilasta verkkoyhteyteen. Työn ensimmäinen osa käsittelee NR:n yleisiä ominaisuuksia, alalinkin fyysisiä signaaleja ja kanavia, sekä päätelaitteen virrankulutusta verkkoyhteydessä. Seuraavaksi käsitellään olemassa olevia virransäästötekniikoita, sekä käydään läpi uutta herätys-tyyppistä mekanismia ja päätelaitteen virransäästösignaalin/herätyssignaalin (wake-up signal, WUS) toimintaa. Lopuksi kuvataan erilaisia virransäästösignaalivaihtoehtoja ja tutkitaan niiden havaitsemisen suorituskykyä. Työn virransäästösignaalivaihtoehdot voidaan jakaa alalinkin kontrollikanava- (physical downlink control channel, PDCCH) ja sekvenssipohjaisiin signaaleihin/kanaviin. PDCCH-pohjaisessa vaihtoehdossa virransäästösignaali siirretään PDCCH:n hyötykuormana. Tutkitut sekvenssipohjaiset vaihtoehdot ovat toissijainen synkronointisignaali (secondary synchronization signal, SSS), PDCCH-demodulaatio-referenssisignaali (demodulation reference signal, DMRS), kanavan tilatieto-referenssisignaali (channel-state information reference signal, CSI-RS), sekä UE-spesifinen sekvenssi, joka asetetaan PDCCH:n jokaiseen alikantoaaltoon. Jälkimmäisen havaitseminen tehdään aikatasossa ja muiden sekvenssien havaitseminen tehdään taajuustasossa. Näiden signaalien/kanavien havaitsemisen suorituskykyä vertaillaan linkkitason simulointitulosten perusteella. Simulaatiot tehtiin Matlab-pohjaisella simulaattorilla. Ne esittävät aika- ja taajuusselektiivisyyden, sekä toteutuksen epäideaalisuuksien vaikutusta. Numeeristen tulosten perusteella, UE:n nopeus arvoon 120 km/h ja kantoaaltotaajuussiirto (carrier frequency offset, CFO) 400 Hz:iin asti voidaan jättää huomioimatta, kaikkien muiden paitsi CSI-RS:n tapauksessa. Työssä osoitettiin, että sekvenssipohjaiset WUS-vaihtoehdot kärsivät taajuusselektiivisestä radiokanavasta. Kanavan negatiivista vaikutusta voidaan pienentää tekemällä päätöksiä kanavan koherenssikaistanleveyttä pienemmissä osissa, sekä käyttämällä syklistä esikooderia. Näillä tekniikoilla PDCCH DMRS suoriutuu kaikkia muita sekvenssipohjaisia vaihtoehtoja paremmin. Kuitenkin, havaitsemisen suorituskyvyn perusteella PDCCH-pohjainen virransäästösignaali/kanava on vahvin ehdokas näistä vaihtoehdoista