NB-IoT optimization for smart meters networks of smart cities: Case study

Abstract

The future demands for Smart Meters (SM) applications impose maximizing resources utilization. In this paper, we achieve two main objectives to comply with fifth-generation networks goals and serving the SM applications. First one is to enhance the Narrowband-Internet-of-Things spectral efficiency. The second is to alleviate the signalling burden during each transmission request for SMs. First, we model the uplink scheduler for the NB-IoT access network using the state-machine modelling methodology on the Simulink environment. The simulation results are verified and validated with trusted modelling technique. Second, we optimize the NB-IoT uplink scheduler, which exploits the periodicity nature of SMs applications. We achieve that by proposing an integrated scheduling protocol which rearranges the transmission times of different smart meters utilities, and it draws a map for the transmission schedule of them to better utilize the sparse time resources. The proposed approach comprises architecture, signalling, and algorithms. We evaluate the optimization in term of numbers of SMs versus four performance indicators; resources utilization, spectral 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 utilization to 17.47%. This enhancement reflects on spectral efficiency that improved doubled.