On Channel Estimation in LTE-Based Downlink Narrowband Internet of Things Systems

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) systems were specified by 3GPP in release 13 as a low power wide area network (LPWAN) technology to operate with a very narrow bandwidth of 180 kHz only. Due to fragile radio signal operating conditions (where a signal is weaker than noise), NB-IoT channel status becomes highly complex. Therefore, an effective and low complexity channel estimation will perform a significant role in the receiver operation. The linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) scheme is very effective in estimating the channel but introduces massive complexity because of having complex matrix inversion. In this paper, we first derive the analytical model of the signal for long-term evolution (LTE)-based NB-IoT downlink systems and propose a reduced complexity LMMSE channel estimation for the downlink NB-IoT systems by applying singular value decomposition (SVD) technique along with partitioning the whole channel matrix into small submatrices. Furthermore, we apply the overlap banded technique to optimize the performance of the proposed channel estimator. As a result of exploiting several submatrices instead of a larger channel matrix, the operational complexity is significantly optimized. Lastly, we propose a polyphase filter structure for implementing the interpolation procedure instead of the conventional interpolation method to further optimize the performance and complexity of the proposed channel estimator further. The performance of the proposed technique has been justified by the mean square error (MSE), bit error rate (BER), and instantaneous throughput for the related signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The system complexity is verified by the number of complex multiplications used. Simulation evaluations indicate that with the sacrifice of negligible performance, the proposed modified LMMSE technique along with the proposed interpolation possesses a good balance between the performance and the system complexity that could help the proposed techniques to be applied successfully in the low complexity NB-IoT systems.