Design Low Power Physical Layer of NB-IOT LTE Uplink Receiver

Introduction:

However, LTE was designed for high-speed communication and is not optimized for applications that
need to support a potentially large number of low-rate, low power and delay tolerant devices

The internet of things (IoT) is the big move forward, connecting our everyday household objects to the
cloud. Most commonly the IoT devices make use of the local wireless internet connections available and,
similar to land-line phones, this greatly limits the mobility of the user. The next big step came with
cellular mobile connections, allowing users to always be reachable on their phones (almost) anywhere
they go. The current 4G mobile systems make use of 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) to reach higher
throughput and improve robustness. To give IoT devices the same mobility and connection quality as
enjoyed by today’s mobile phones 3GPP introduced the narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) functionality in LTE
release 14. This new functionality employs a small subset of the current LTE band to handle IoT-device
traffic, allowing a greater number of connected units per frequency band and the IoT devices to lower
their power consumption.

NB-IoT is a radio access technology standardized by 3GPP for cellular wireless communication. It is
especially suited for a high volume of low-complexity devices in challenging radio environments such as
deep buildings or underground radio signal penetration. Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), also known as LTE
Cat NB1, is a Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technology that works virtually anywhere. It connects IoT
devices more simply and efficiently on already established mobile networks and handles small amounts
of fairly infrequent 2-way data, securely and reliably. And the best is, it provides very low power
consumption, excellent extended 18 range in buildings and underground, easy deployment into existing
cellular network architecture, network security & reliability and lower component cost.

Realizing the importance of IOT for low-power and low-cost applications with extended coverage and
very long battery life, 3GPP introduced narrowband IOT (NB-IOT), as a part of their LTE-Release-14.
Although NB-IOT is based on LTE, but it's a new radio-access technology as it is not fully backward
compatible with the existing LTE devices. However, it can be easily integrated in the existing LTE
network by allocating some of the time and frequency resources to NB-IOT
Transmitter UP-link Chain:

The uplink of NB-IoT is based on SCFDMA with the same 15 kHz subcarrier spacing as LTE. Slot,
subframe, and frame durations are 0.5 ms, 1 ms, and 10 ms, respectively, identical to those in LTE.
Furthermore, slot format in terms of cyclic prefix (CP) duration and number of SC-FDM symbols per slot
are also identical to those in LTE.

Frame Structure

- Type 1, applicable to FDD only

, - Type 2, applicable to TDD only,

UL RB
A physical resource block is defined as N symb consecutive SC-FDMA symbols in the time domain and N sc
consecutive subcarriers in the frequency domain corresponding to one slot in the time domain and 180
kHz in the frequency domain.

In the LTE system, two cyclic prefix (CP) formats can be used for SC-FDMA symbols: normal and
extended. The extended format reduces the number of SC-FDMA symbols per slot to six. In NB-IoT, the
extended CP is not allowed and thus each slot is strictly composed of seven SC-FDMA symbols.

In NB-IoT, the uplink transmissions can be done using (single-tone and multi-tone) options, but they
depend on the used subcarrier spacing. In this respect, if the 3.75 kHz spacing is used, only the single
tone option is possible (i.e., one subcarrier is used). In contrast, in the case of 15 kHz spacing, the two
options can be performed through four possible transmission configurations: one, three, six or 12
subcarriers.

RU
Resource unit N sc , which represents the smallest unit that can be transmitted in uplink regardless of
the subcarrier spacing being used and depends only on the transmission option (i.e., single-tone or
multi-tone). In such cases, the duration of the RU will be shorter when a higher number of subcarriers is
used since a greater number of REs can be transmitted within a shorter duration.

Cyclic Redundancy Check:

Cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is a common data transmission error detection technique used in the
data communication field. The transmit end calculates a check code for Overall transmission chain of the
UE in a data frame based on a certain algorithm, appends the check code to the data frame, and sends
the data frame to the receive end. The eNB Receiver end verifies the correctness and integrity of the
received data by repeating the calculation using the same algorithm.

Turbo Encoder:

Turbo codes is the coding technique used in many communications and storage systems because its
performance is close to Shannon limit. Its function is helping the receiver to correct the received data.
it consists of two Recursive Systematic Convolutional (RSC) encoders with three shift registers XOR-ed
according to the following polynomials and one internal interleaver where the input to the encoder is
interleaved before entering the 2nd RSC encoder. However, the first one takes the input directly as it is

Rate Matcher:

The basic function of this module is matching the number of bits in transport block to the number of bits
that is transmitted through the channel. It also controls the rate as the turbo encoder gives 1/3 rate.

Interleaver:

The main function of this block in narrowband, taking into consideration that there is no control
information, is overcoming burst errors. As for the channels with deep fading characteristics, errors
often occur in bursts, these consecutive bits may be of the same symbol. This block overcomes this type
of noise by changing this burst error into a group of discrete errors by reordering the bits so that the
error happens in one bit only inside the same symbol.