NB-IoT for radio resource management in HetNets

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT), also known as LTE Cat NB1, is a Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) radio technology that works virtually anywhere. Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are a fundamental enabling technology for fifth generation (5G) networks. HetNets are a promising solution to meet the capacity demands of 5G services. HetNets deploys small cells to boost capacity per location. One of the easiest ways to deploy the NB-IoT standard is to use Physical Resource Blocks (PRB) within the LTE broadband carrier frequency. PRBs can be used to integrate in-band operation within an existing LTE network’s spectrum. Despite its fast implementation, this approach is more subject to internal interference than any other one. NB-IoT power boosting of +6 dB is used in this paper to achieve higher SINR and user throughput eventually resulting in improved network capacity to overcome the interference issue. Users connected to the small cells may require a higher SINR due to the interference caused by the macro cell within the HetNets. While other NB-IoT research has also focused on reducing power consumption, it has yet to show how HetNet’s capacity performance is enhanced using NB-IoT boosting. In this work, an NB-IoT power-boosting algorithm has been developed to improve user throughput and network capacity. The results showed that with 100% (p = 1) NB-IoT boosting for both 1000 users and 5000 users, the overall network capacity and user throughput performance improved by 38.71% and 18.6%, respectively. The boost in power enables NB-IoT devices to connect more effectively or travel farther between obstacles.