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Fakultät für Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik
P. Jörke and T. Gebauer and S. Böcker, C. Wietfeld

Scaling Dense NB-IoT Networks to the Max: Performance Benefits of Early Data Transmission

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in
  • Dipl.-Ing. Stefan Böcker
  • Tim Gebauer
  • Pascal Jörke
  • Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christian Wietfeld
  • Publications
  • 5hine
  • PuLS
  • SFB 876

In 2022 IEEE 95th Vehicular Technology Conference: VTC2022-Spring.

Abstract:

The growing number of IoT devices will lead to a massive number of users in communication networks. Therefore, this work analyzes the scalability boundaries of NB-IoT networks with different transmission modes, called standard transmissions, Cellular IoT Optimization, and Early Data Transmission, using a novel detailed implementation of NB-IoT in the NS-3 LTE simulation framework LENA. The results show that Early Data Transmission clearly outperforms NB-IoT standard transmissions and Cellular IoT Optimization by providing up to 4.1 times less latency and 1.6 times longer battery lifetime, while only using one-fourth of the downlink spectrum. Further, a good scalability for up to 864.000 devices per day in a cell with an area of 4.91km², or 176.000 devices per day and km² for all NB-IoT standard transmission, Cellular IoT Optimization, and Early Data Transmission scenarios is given. It is shown that the scalability is limited by downlink spectrum capacity for non-Early Data Transmission scenarios and Random Access windows for all scenarios. Doubling the number of Random Access windows improves the performance in highly scaled scenarios in terms of a larger packet delivery rate and fewer Random Access collisions. Still, the number of Random Access collisions for scenarios over 1.000.000 devices per day is very high, which indicates the necessity of a detailed optimization for the radio resource configuration when using new features like Early Data Transmission for optimal cellular performance. Still, the analysis results show a great positive impact of Early Data Transmission on the overall performance and is highly recommended to be used by default.