NB‐IoT optimisation: Holistic view for smart cities applications with smart meters networks case study

Abstract

The future demands for smart-cities applications impose maximising the resources utilisation. This study achieves two main objectives to comply with fifth-generation networks goals. First one is to enhance the Narrowband-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) spectralefficiency. The second is to alleviate the burden of two issues: The signalling during each transmission request for smart-meters (SM) and queuing burden. First, we model the uplink scheduler for the NB-IoT access network using state-machine modelling methodology on Simulink environment. The simulation result is verified and validated with trusted modelling technique. Second, we optimise the NB-IoT uplink scheduler which exploits the periodicity nature of SMs applications with putting envisage considering the emergency conditions. This is done by proposing integrated scheduling protocol which classifies the IoT traffic types and rearranges the transmission times of different SMs utilities and draws a map for the transmission schedule of them to better utilise the sparse time resources. The proposal comprises architecture, signalling, and algorithms. The optimisation is evaluated in term of numbers of SMs versus four spectral performance indicators; utilisation, efficiency, setup-success-percentage, and session-drop-rate according to a case study. The simulation results prove the ability of our proposal to increase the spectrum-utilisation to 17.47%. This enhancement reflects on spectral-efficiency that improved doubled.