Prototyping of Open Source NB-IoT Network

TL;DR

This paper details the development of an open source NB-IoT network prototype, demonstrating its integration with existing LTE infrastructure and its capability to support IoT devices using commercial modules.

Contribution

It introduces an open source NB-IoT network prototype built through industry-academic collaboration, connecting to an EPC and supporting commercial IoT modules.

Findings

Successful connection of NB-IoT eNB to EPC.

Demonstration of data forwarding from COTS NB-IoT modules.

Open source implementation facilitates NB-IoT network development.

Abstract

Narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT) is one of the major access technologies proposed to support massive machine type communications (mMTC) services for the 5th generation (5G) mobile networks. Many emerging services and networking paradigms are expected to be developed on top of NB-IoT networks. This paper summarizes the steps required to build up an open source narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT) network. This work is a joint research and development (R&D) result from industry and academic collaboration. The open source NB-IoT enhanced Node B (eNB) is jointly developed by B-COM and NTUST based on the well-known OpenAirInterfaceTM (OAI) open source Long-Term Evolution (LTE) eNB developed by EURECOM. The NB-IoT eNB is successfully connected to an evolved packet core (EPC) developed by Nokia Bell Lab. We demonstrate how to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) NB-IoT module to forward its sensing data to the Internet via the open source NB-IoT network.