NB-IoT for 5G: How 5G Aligns With NB-IoT

Introduction

Before going through the technologies presented in this chapter, it is essential to understand the basic principles of narrowband Internet of things (NB-IoT) and the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks. It is expected that you have already got some ideas about these technologies in the previous chapters. 5G mobile networks are advanced high speed cellular networks based on IMT 2020 mobile telecommunication standards. The most important thing about the 5G is that the expected services from mobile communication can be obtained easily with fewer expenses compared to the previous legacy versions. 5G has the ability to provide services such as high speed live video streaming, online games which will attract many Internet consumers in the market (Sharma et al., 2019). 5G devices are connected to the telephone network and the Internet by radio waves via multiple local antennas in the cell. In addition to the conventional microwave frequencies, millimeter waves (wavelength in the range: 10 mm to 1 mm) technologies are also the candidates for high speed communications.

In 4G cellular communications, there is no facility for devices to communicate with each other. All communications pass through the gateways and base station. This is inefficient especially when the devices are close by. In the scheme like machine to machine (M2M) communications, number of devices which form network is very large, so it is required that devices communicate directly with each other.5G facilitates many of the devices to connect and to exchange information directly. 5G technology can be used as a flexible platform for numerous applications. To get the benefits it is required that the core network should reach to the unique levels of intelligence and flexibility. However, there are many challenges that wireless operators are facing to enhance capacity and performance even in 5G environment. 5G would be seen in the future everywhere to connect people among themselves or with the devices. IoT applications are widely proposed as a major use case in the imminent 5G mobile network. It is also anticipated that IoT will be a part of 5G technologies as it helps to connect various devices to the user. At present, various types of IoT networks are available. NB-IoT is a new type of radio access technology which requires very less resources for its deployment. Massive number of devices will be connected together in the 5G NB-IoT, which will need high rate to support successful delivery of messages in a certain time period.

Figure 1.

Basic 5G Architecture

Even though Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology has the ability to provide better network connectivity in IoTs but cellular network takes up most of the available bandwidth and causes extra costs. NB-IoT can be used for number of low-power devices, which increase network coverage and also provide better spectrum utilization. Since battery life is more than 10 years it can be used for a wide range of use cases. 5G network deployment permits the shift of IoT to a purely cellular based context so that devices could connect with each other via a subscriber identity module (SIM). 5G is not only for cell phones but it covers broad applications, which can be divided in two parallel directions of wireless network coverage: one works with short-range for ultra-high bandwidth, directional communication, and another one uses ultra-low power and covers a wide area.

The main objectives of this chapter are to identify the key challenges for 5G NB-IoT activities, finding proper frameworks for their deployment, their potentials in the long run, and to analyse their applications. This chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of 5G NB-IoT principles, features, potentials and few applications. Finally, some future research prospects have been analysed.

The remaining parts this chapter is organised as follows. In section 2, we present the literature review for 5G, NB-IoT and their combination. In section 3, we present the requirements of 5G NB-IoT. In section 4, we show the NB-IoT network architecture and explained its features. In section 5, we present the future research directions of 5G NB-IoT. Finally, we conclude the chapter in section 6.