Abstract—5G Technology is the most recent scientific development in wireless communication and it is evolving day by day to meet the demand of near future. As per 3GPP, NB-IoT is chosen as a most promising technology that has been specified for 5G machine type communication (5G-MTC). Since 5G relies on low power wide area networks (LPWAN) and NB-IoT is suitable low power technology in deploying MTC in 5G networks. NB-IoT operates in a licensed spectrum bands and has the potential to guarantee quality of service (QoS). NB-IoT is a specified LPWAN that is based upon system bandwidth of 180 kHz and sub carrier spacing can be considered as 3.75 kHz and 15 kHz as per 3GPP, NB-IoT in downlink system only supports 15 kHz sub carrier spacing. NB-IoT is a top competitor for other low power networks that operates in both licensed and unlicensed spectrum ad 3GPP has specialized NB-IoT as a top priority in 5G networks to support massive machine type communication. In this article, we have studied the technologies for NB-IoT and its implementation in 5G MTC. We also designed a NB-IoT downlink system based on 3GPP guidelines considering sub carrier spacing as 15 kHz and its performance analysis is carried out for MTC scenario. The analysis is performed with two different antenna configurations and compared its performance analysis in terms of BER, FER and QPSK constellation of NPDCCH and NPDSCH after channel estimation. The BER and FER of both NPDCCH and NPDSCH decrease with SNR, resulting the better performance towards machine type communications in 5G.
 

Index Terms—5G, NB-IoT, MTC, Downlink, NPDCCH, NPDSCH, OFDMA

Cite: Lalit Chettri, Rabindranath Bera, and Jayanta Kumar Barauh, "Performance Analysis of 3GPP NB-IoT Downlink System towards 5G Machine Type Communication (5G-MTC)," Journal of Communications vol. 16, no. 8, pp. 355-362, August 2021. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.16.8.355-362