Exploiting NB-IoT Network Performance and Capacity for Smart-Metering Use-Cases

The requirements introduced in directive 2019/944 of the European Parliament for the smart metering scenarios, which differ from the ones defined in ITD-R M.2410, accelerated the integration of cellular technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT). Requiring a permanent connection to the cellular network (radio resource control in a connected state) and more synchronous-oriented data transmissions led to selecting the Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) technology as the main enabler for the secured data transmissions. This paper focuses on the features introduced by 3GPP in Release 13, i.e., user plane and control plane optimization, and Release 15 early data transmissions (EDT) for the smart metering scenarios. Our simulation results confirm that EDT is a powerful feature for decreasing transmission delay and improving spectrum efficiency with reduced overheads. Our results show that the transmission delay is reduced by over 50 %. Notably, the data indicates EDT significantly improves latency for smaller messages (for Release 13, less than 97 B in uplink and 57 B in downlink). Finally, the results confirm that an NB-IoT network (3GPP Release. 13; NB1) can manage 1000 smart meters per single base station communicating in a 15 minutes window.