Enhancing Coverage in Narrow Band-IoT Using Machine Learning

International audience—Narrow Band-Internet of Thing (NB-IoT) is a recently proposed technology by 3GPP in Release-13. It provides low energy consumption and wide coverage in order to meet the requirements of its diverse applications that span social, industrial and environmental aspects. Increasing the number of repetitions of the transmission has been selected as a promising approach to enhance the coverage in NB-IoT up to 164 dB in terms of maximum coupling loss for uplink transmissions, which is a significant improvement compared with legacy LTE technologies, especially to serve users in deep coverage. However, a large number of repetitions reduces the system throughput and increases the energy consumption of the IoT devices, which reduces their battery lifetime and increases their maintenance cost. In this work, we propose a new method for enhancing the NB-IoT coverage based on machine learning algorithms. Instead of employing a random spectrum access procedure, dynamic spectrum access can reduce the number of required repetitions, increase the coverage, and reduce the energy consumption. Index Terms—Narrow-band Internet of Things (NB-IoT), Coverage Enhancement (CE), Dynamic spectrum access, Reinforcement learnin