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An Introduction to NB-IOT
Muhammad Sualeh Emad
FAST -National University of Computer Emerging Sciences

Abstract: Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new cellular technology introduced in

3GPP Release 13 for providing wide-area coverage for the Internet of Things (IoT). This article
provides an overview of the air interface of NB-IoT. We describe how NB-IoT addresses key IoT
requirements such as deployment flexibility, low device complexity,

PACS numbers:

I. INTRODUCTION II. DEPLOYMENT OPTIONS AND

TRANSMISSION SCHEMES

A 180KHz frequency channel is required to be allocated

within the existing LTE carrier or in the guard band
of the spectrum. It is further illustrated in the below
mentioned figure,
Solutions to wirelessly communicate with machines are
being developed at a very rapid pace. Huge interest is
being taken into integrating connectivity solutions with
appliances. Therefore, giving huge areas of interest in
Internet of Things (IoT). The Internet of Things (IoT)
is thus being created and constantly expanded. IoT
consists of a number of networks that may have differ-
ent design objectives. For example, some networks are FIG. 1: Deployment of NB-IOT with in LTE PRBs
only intended to cover few towns where as others oper-
ate throughout the country. Recognizing the importance
of IoT, 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has
introduced a number of key features for IoT in its lat-
est release, Rel-13. EC-GSM-IoT and LTE-MTC aims
to enhance existing Global System for Mobile Commu-
nications (GSM) and Long-Term Evolution (LTE) net-
works, respectively, for better IoT use cases. Coverage
footprint extension for operators and handsets complex-
ity minimization along with extended battery lifetime,
are common objectives. Moreover, Narrowband Internet
of Things (NB-IoT) shares these objectives as well. On
top of it, NB-IoT purposes to offer deployment flexibil- FIG. 2: Deployment of NB-IOT with in Guard Band
ity allowing operator to introduce NB-IoT using a small
portion of their existing spectrum. NB-IoT is usually de- The deployment scenario, stand-alone, in-band, or
signed for mainly targeting the ultra-low-end IoT apps. guard-band, however should be transparent to a user
However, NB-IoT it is not fully compatible with existing equipment (UE) when it is first turned on and searches
3GPP devices but it is designed to achieve coexistence for an NB-IoT carrier. Similar to existing LTE UEs, an
performance with legacy GSM, and LTE technologies. NB-IoT UE is only required to search for a carrier on a
NB-IoT requires 180 kHz minimum system bandwidth 100 kHz raster. An NB-IoT carrier that is initially re-
for uplink/downlink, respectively. NB-IoT provides the quired by UE to latch on to the network is referred to as
choice of minimum system bandwidth which enables a an anchor carrier. The anchor carrier of 100 kHz, that
number of deployment scenarios. A legacy GSM opera- UE search raster implies that for in-band deployments
tor can surrender one GSM carrier (200 kHz) to enable can only be allocated to certain PRBs depending upon
NB-IoT, while an LTE operator can deploy NB-IoT in the total LTE Spectrum. Below mentioned Figure (3)
the guard-band of the LTE carrier or allocate one of the shows the preferred PRBs to be selected as an anchor
Physical Resource Blocks (PRB) of 180 kHz to it. We carrier for LTE Spectrum. Similarly, an NB-IoT anchor
would later describe possible optimized solutions to en- carrier in the guard-band deployment needs to have cen-
sure coexistence of NB-IOT with LTE, hence enhancing ter frequency of 7.5 kHz at max, from the 100 kHz raster.
the performance. NB-IoT cell search and initial acquisition are designed

for a UE to be able to synchronize to the network in the
presence of a raster offset of up to 7.5 kHz.
FIG. 3: Preferred PRBs for LTE Spectrum
LTE uses OFDMA at its downlink therefore NB-IoT
will also be using the same platform, with the same 15
kHz subcarrier spacing as LTE where sub-frame, and
frame durations are 0.5ms, 1ms, and 10ms, respectively.
Also, for NB-IOT slot format in terms of cyclic prefix
duration and number of OFDM symbols per slot will
also be identical to those in LTE. In essence, an NB-
IoT carrier uses one LTE PRB in the frequency domain,
reusing OFDM syntax as LTE ensures the coexistence
performance with LTE in the downlink. The uplink will
also follow suit as downlink of NB-IoT, where it sup-
ports both multi-tone and single-tone transmissions. As
Multi-tone transmission in LTE is based on SC-FDMA
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
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.
III. RESOURCE MAPPING
In this section, we describe how NB-IoT resource map-
ping is designed to ensure the best performance in co-
existence with LTE. Fundamentally, the orthogonality
to LTE signals is maintained by avoiding the mapping
of NB-IoT signals to the PRBs already assigned by the
legacy LTE signals. There are 12 resource elements per
OFDM symbol which corresponds to each of the subcar-
riers. For the guard-band deployments no LTE resources
needs to be protected, thus physical channels can utilize
all the resource elements in one PRB pair. However, for
[1] H. Shariatmadari, R. Ratasuk, S. Iraji, A. Laya, T. Taleb,
R. Jantti, and A. Ghosh. ”Machine-type communications:
current status and future perspectives toward 5G systems.”
IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 53, no. 9, Sept.
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Advanced for mobile broadband, Oxford, UK: Academic
2
the in-band deployment, the physical channels cannot be
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.
On the other hand, physical channels which are used
for synchronization and system information acquisition.
These signals need to be detected without knowing the
deployment mode. To avoid such a scenario, the physical
channels, avoid the first three OFDM symbols in every
sub frame as these resource elements may be used by LTE
dedicated control channel. Furthermore, physical chan-
nels overlapping with resource elements taken by LTE
Cell-Specific Reference Symbols (CRS) are punctured at
the base station. Although the UE is not aware of which
resource elements are punctured, physicals channels can
still be detected by correlating the received punctured
physical channel signal with the non-punctured signal
since the percentage of punctured resource elements is
relatively small.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
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
designed to allow easy integration and sharing of radio
resources within the existing GSM and LTE networks.
Further enhancements to the topic with future research
areas to be explored are introducing low complexity mul-
ticast functionality, for rolling out firmware updates, and
enhancing positioning accuracy, which is majorly very
important to many IoT applications. NB-IoT is the next
step towards the building of the fifth-generation (5G) ra-
dio access technology intended for enabling new use cases
like machine type communications. It is foreseen that
NB-IoT will continue to evolve towards the 5G require-
ments.
Press, 2011.
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White Paper, Jan. 2016. [Online]. Available:
https://www.ericsson.com/res/docs/whitepapers/wpi ot.pdf
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complexity and low throughput internet of things, Nov.
2015.