Uplink Scheduling and Link Adaptation for Narrowband Internet of Things Systems

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new narrow-band radio technology introduced in the Third Generation Partnership Project release 13 to the 5th generation evolution for providing low-power wide-area IoT. In NB-IoT systems, repeating transmission data or control signals has been considered as a promising approach for enhancing coverage. Considering the new feature of repetition, link adaptation for NB-IoT systems needs to be performed in 2-D, i.e., the modulation and coding scheme (MCS) and the repetition number. Therefore, existing link adaptation schemes without consideration of the repetition number are no longer applicable. In this paper, a novel uplink link adaptation scheme with the repetition number determination is proposed, which is composed of the inner loop link adaptation and the outer loop link adaptation, to guarantee transmission reliability and improve throughput of NB-IoT systems. In particular, the inner loop link adaptation is designed to cope with block error ratio variation by periodically adjusting the repetition number. The outer loop link adaptation coordinates the MCS level selection and the repetition number determination. Besides, key technologies of uplink scheduling, such as power control and transmission gap, are analyzed, and a simple single-tone scheduling scheme is proposed. Link-level simulations are performed to validate the performance of the proposed uplink link adaptation scheme. The results show that our proposed uplink link adaptation scheme for NB-IoT systems outperforms the repetition-dominated method and the straightforward method, particularly for good channel conditions and larger packet sizes. Specifically, it can save more than 14% of the active time and resource consumption compared with the repetition-dominated method and save more than 46% of the active time and resource consumption compared with the straightforward method.