Modeling the process of dynamic resource sharing between LTE and NB-IoT services

The Internet of Things (IoT) undergoes fundamental changes, expanding its infrastructure with more advanced and mobile devices. As the IoT develops, the existing cellular communication technologies often do not provide sufficient coverage while modern IoT terminals are often expensive and characterized by a short battery life. To address these issues, in Release 13 (LTE Advanced Pro) published in 2016, 3GPP consortium has proposed the Narrow-Band IoT (NB-IoT) technology as an efficient way to provide a wide range of new capabilities and services in a wireless cellular network. Having specified three operational regimes, 3GPP did not provide guidelines on the way resource sharing has to be done between LTE and NB-IoT traffic. In this paper, the in-band NB-IoT service model is presented, where a certain amount of LTE radio resources are exclusively allocated to LTE and NB-IoT users while the rest are shared between them. We analyze the proposed system for performance metrics of interest including NB-IoT and LTE session drop probabilities and resource utilization. © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.