Simulink based Modeling and Performance Analysis of NB-IoT Uplink Scheduler

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) became a complement part of the fifth-generation (5G) network’s specifications due to its superiority to the other IoT networks from many different aspects. However, the relation between NB-IoT spectral efficiency and the type of IoT application is not studied enough. This paper evaluates the NB-IoT uplink scheduler’s performance based on the current standard for the four different NB-IoT data rates to study three performance metrics for each one. We apply our analysis to the traffic of periodic IoT applications. The Simulink environment’s State-flow toolbox is exploited, which supports state-machine modeling methodology to benefit from their features to model the NB-IoT access network’s uplink scheduler with a scalable model capability for future works. After verification and validation, our simulation results depict that the NB-IoT single-tone data rate achieves the highest resources utilization, and it is the optimum choice to carry periodic IoT traffic.