Coverage and Deployment Analysis of NB-IoT Technology under Various Environment Scenarios

Standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and introduced in release 13, the Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) technology seems well suited for wireless IoT end devices with low power consumption, low data throughput, and long-range communication requirements, which need to control and monitor environmental conditions in remote and harsh locations. However, being NB-IoT an emerging technology, it is necessary to study its reliability under such use-case scenarios. This paper presents an NB-IoT coverage analysis in the North region of Portugal under various environment scenarios: indoor, underground, and inside an underground concrete dome with an iron cover, using a custom-developed NB-IoT end device equipped with the Quectel BC66 as the communication modem and a custom application executing over the Azure ThreadX RTOS. Our investigation leans over the coverage quality based on some indicators collected, such as RSRP, RSRQ, RSSI, ECL, PCI, and transmission power. The obtained results indicate that this technology is capable of satisfying the requirements of the most demanding IoT applications, with percentages of successful transmissions above 96%, even at distances greater than 1400m between the device and the communication infrastructure (LTE) cell, or even in regions with very low/noise floor coverage.