Narrowband Internet of Things: Implementations and Applications

Recently, narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT), one of the most promising low power wide area (LPWA) technologies, has attracted much attention from both academia and industry. It has great potential to meet the huge demand for machine-type communications in the era of IoT. To facilitate research on and application of NB-IoT, in this paper, we design a system that includes NB devices, an IoT cloud platform, an application server, and a user app. The core component of the system is to build a development board that integrates an NB-IoT communication module and a subscriber identification module, a micro-controller unit and power management modules. We also provide a firmware design for NB device wake-up, data sensing, computing and communication, and the IoT cloud configuration for data storage and analysis. We further introduce a framework on how to apply the proposed system to specific applications. The proposed system provides an easy approach to academic research as well as commercial applications.