Narrowband IoT: Principles, Potentials, and Applications

Introduction

Internet of things (IoT) is now an integral part of the modern digital ecosystem. It has the ability to connect every object and living beings with the Internet. Therefore, it is one of the leading technologies in the current digital transformation across the world. Looking at the widespread deployment of the IoT components such as the sensors, actuators, servers, edge computing infrastructure, and other facilities; it is clear that the energy and other IoT resources will be needed in a large amount. In order to reduce the energy and other resource consumption there is a need of a leaner and thinner version of IoT. Narrowband IoT (NBIoT) is one such resource efficient version available now (3GPP, 2016). It was evolved from the need of large scale machine type communications over the LTE networks (GSMA, 2018). It is one of the most popular low power wide area (LPWA) technologies. It does not have adverse effects on the human and other living beings. That is why it is considered as a main technology for ambient living ecosystem (Routray, 2021). It is also preferred for the large scale deployments over a large coverage area. Cost wise, it is one of the economical forms of the available IoT (Chen et al., 2017). Its deployment is simpler when compared with other types of IoT (Routray, 2019). Its standardization has been completed and new provisions are added with the new application demands. It can be deployed over the cellular infrastructure as well as in the standalone mode (3GPP, 2016). It has enormous potential for low power applications. It is one of the most attractive LPWA technologies in a large number of technology and non-technology sectors in recent times. Therefore we find a lot of applications of NBIoT in the low power regime (Xu et al., 2017).