An Introduction to NB-IOT
Muhammad Sualeh Emad
FAST -National University of Computer Emerging Sciences
PACS numbers:
for a UE to be able to synchronize to the network in the the in-band deployment, the physical channels cannot be
presence of a raster offset of up to 7.5 kHz. directly mapped to the resource elements of LTE. NB-IoT
is designed to allow to the UE to learn the deployment
mode (stand-alone, in-band, or guard band) as well as the
cell identity (both NB-IoT and LTE) through initial ac-
quisition. Then the UE can figure out which resource ele-
ments are to be used by the LTE. With this information,
the UE can map symbols to available resource elements.
FIG. 3: Preferred PRBs for LTE Spectrum
On the other hand, physical channels which are used
for synchronization and system information acquisition.
LTE uses OFDMA at its downlink therefore NB-IoT These signals need to be detected without knowing the
will also be using the same platform, with the same 15 deployment mode. To avoid such a scenario, the physical
kHz subcarrier spacing as LTE where sub-frame, and channels, avoid the first three OFDM symbols in every
frame durations are 0.5ms, 1ms, and 10ms, respectively. sub frame as these resource elements may be used by LTE
Also, for NB-IOT slot format in terms of cyclic prefix dedicated control channel. Furthermore, physical chan-
duration and number of OFDM symbols per slot will nels overlapping with resource elements taken by LTE
also be identical to those in LTE. In essence, an NB- Cell-Specific Reference Symbols (CRS) are punctured at
IoT carrier uses one LTE PRB in the frequency domain, the base station. Although the UE is not aware of which
reusing OFDM syntax as LTE ensures the coexistence resource elements are punctured, physicals channels can
performance with LTE in the downlink. The uplink will still be detected by correlating the received punctured
also follow suit as downlink of NB-IoT, where it sup- physical channel signal with the non-punctured signal
ports both multi-tone and single-tone transmissions. As since the percentage of punctured resource elements is
Multi-tone transmission in LTE is based on SC-FDMA relatively small.
with the same 15 kHz subcarrier spacing, 0.5ms slot, and
1 ms sub-frame. Single-tone transmission supports two
numerologies, 15 kHz and 3.75 kHz. The 15 kHz is sim-
ilar to LTE and thus achieves the best coexistence in
IV. CONCLUSIONS
platform. The 3.75 kHz single-tone numerology uses 2
ms slot duration. The uplink of NB-IoT carrier uses the
total bandwidth of 180 kHz as does the downlink. In this article, we had an overview of NB-IoT and have
discussed in detail how deployment of NB-IOT is possi-
ble within the existing LTE spectrum. NB-IoT is also
III. RESOURCE MAPPING designed to allow easy integration and sharing of radio
resources within the existing GSM and LTE networks.
In this section, we describe how NB-IoT resource map- Further enhancements to the topic with future research
ping is designed to ensure the best performance in co- areas to be explored are introducing low complexity mul-
existence with LTE. Fundamentally, the orthogonality ticast functionality, for rolling out firmware updates, and
to LTE signals is maintained by avoiding the mapping enhancing positioning accuracy, which is majorly very
of NB-IoT signals to the PRBs already assigned by the important to many IoT applications. NB-IoT is the next
legacy LTE signals. There are 12 resource elements per step towards the building of the fifth-generation (5G) ra-
OFDM symbol which corresponds to each of the subcar- dio access technology intended for enabling new use cases
riers. For the guard-band deployments no LTE resources like machine type communications. It is foreseen that
needs to be protected, thus physical channels can utilize NB-IoT will continue to evolve towards the 5G require-
all the resource elements in one PRB pair. However, for ments.