RACH in Self-Powered NB-IoT Networks: Energy Availability and Performance Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the energy availability and RACH success probability in self-powered NB-IoT networks, considering energy harvesting, repetition schemes, and network traffic, providing insights into their impact on network reliability.

Contribution

It models energy dynamics and derives the RACH success probability considering energy harvesting and repetition, offering new analytical insights into self-powered NB-IoT performance.

Findings

Repetition improves RACH success in light traffic scenarios.

Energy availability can remain stable despite stochastic energy harvesting.

Repetition offers limited benefits in heavy traffic conditions.

Abstract

NarrowBand-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new 3GPP radio access technology designed to provide better coverage for a massive number of low-throughput low-cost devices in delay-tolerant applications with low power consumption. To provide reliable connections with extended coverage, a repetition transmission scheme is introduced to NB-IoT during both Random Access CHannel (RACH) procedure and data transmission procedure. To avoid the difficulty in replacing the battery for IoT devices, the energy harvesting is considered as a promising solution to support energy sustainability in the NB-IoT network. In this work, we analyze RACH success probability in a self-powered NB-IoT network taking into account the repeated preamble transmissions and collisions, where each IoT device with data is active when its battery energy is sufficient to support the transmission. We model the temporal dynamics of the energy level as a birth-death process, derive the energy availability of each IoT device, and examine its dependence on the energy storage capacity and the repetition value. We show that in certain scenarios, the energy availability remains unchanged despite randomness in the energy harvesting. We also derive the exact expression for the RACH success probability of a {randomly chosen} IoT device under the derived energy availability, which is validated under different repetition values via simulations. We show that the repetition scheme can efficiently improve the RACH success probability in a light traffic scenario, but only slightly improves that performance with very inefficient channel resource utilization in a heavy traffic scenario.