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
