Cross-City Validation and Refinement of a Path Loss Model for NB-IoT in Urban ScenariosShow others and affiliations
2025 (English)In: IEEE Internet of Things Journal, ISSN 2327-4662, Vol. 12, no 13, p. 25077-25088Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
The Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) technology has an important role in the mobile cellular ecosystem, enabling massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) services. NB-IoT propagation was preliminarily analyzed via a measurement campaign carried out in 2020 in the city of Oslo, Norway. This investigation resulted in Oslo-2020, the first NB-IoT-specific Alpha-Beta-Gamma (ABG) path loss (PL) model, which showed higher prediction accuracy compared to models developed for different technologies but often used for NB-IoT. In this paper, to further investigate NB-IoT PL in urban scenarios, we analyze new measurement campaigns performed in 2020-2021 and 2023 in the city of Rome, Italy. First, we use the 2020-2021 measurements to derive Rome-2021, a new NB-IoT-specific ABG PL model. We show that Rome-2021 preserves the statistical properties of Oslo-2020 (e.g., the Gaussianity of the PL exponent distribution across base stations), although the moments of the distributions are different due to city-specific environmental characteristics. We also use new data on signal losses due to outdoor-to-indoor propagation to refine the analysis of this scenario. Finally, we propose a methodology to combine Oslo-2020 and Rome-2021 into a more general model. Our methodology uses so-called Mixture Distributions (MDs), thus leveraging the shared statistical properties between Oslo-2020 and Rome-2021. By using the 2023 measurements, we show that our MD-based approach estimates PL model parameters with higher accuracy compared to Oslo-2020 and Rome-2021 models used separately, thus providing an effective solution for predicting NB-IoT urban PL in lack of site-specific measurements and information.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2025. Vol. 12, no 13, p. 25077-25088
Keywords [en]
Cellular internet of thing, Cellulars, Empirical model, Machinetype communication (MTC), Massive machine type communication, Narrow bands, Narrowband internet of thing, Path loss, Path loss empirical model, Path loss models, Prediction models
National Category
Communication Systems Computer Sciences Telecommunications
Research subject
Computer Science
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-104724DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2025.3557172ISI: 001512543400034Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105002053648OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kau-104724DiVA, id: diva2:1964329
2025-06-042025-06-042026-02-12Bibliographically approved