An Energy-Efficient and Adaptive Channel Coding Approach for Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) Systems

Most of the current research work on the Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is focused on enhancing its network coverage. Many of the existing NB-IoT channel coding techniques are based on repeating transmission data and control signals as a way of enhancing the network’s reliability and therefore, enabling long-distance transmissions. Although most of these efforts are made at the expense of reducing the energy consumption of the NB-IoT network, they do not always consider the channel conditions. Therefore, this work proposes a novel NB-IoT Energy-Efficient Adaptive Channel Coding (EEACC) scheme. The EEACC approach is a two-dimensional (2D) approach which not only selects an appropriate channel coding scheme based on the estimated channel conditions (dynamically classified as bad, medium or good from initial based on a periodically assessed BLER performance outcome) but also minimizes the transmission repetition number under a pre-assessed probability of successful transmission (based on the ratio of previous successful transmissions over the total number of transmissions). This results in creating a single mixed gradient based on which a higher or lower Modulating Coding Scheme (MCS) is selected on each transmission. It is aimed at enhancing the overall energy efficiency of the network by dynamically selecting the appropriate Modulation Coding Scheme (MCS) number and efficiently minimizing the transmission repetition number. Link-level simulations are performed under different channel conditions (good, medium, or bad) considerations to assess the performance of the proposed up-link adaptation technique for NB-IoT. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed technique outperforms the existing Narrowband Link Adaptation (NBLA) as well as the traditional repetition schemes in terms of the achieved energy efficiency as well as network reliability, latency, and scalability.