TASK
Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is gaining momentum as a promising technology for massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) and its deployment is rapidly progressing worldwide. In this task, you are given two large-scale measurement campaigns of NB-IoT data (Oslo, Norway and Rome, Italy) along with LTE in order to empirically analyze the coverage performance of NB-IoT and LTE on operational networks under different settings.
Both measurement campaigns were designed to explore city-wide coverage and deployment aspects under heterogeneous scenarios.
The measurement campaign in Oslo covered a period of three weeks during summer 2019. Measurements are conducted in various city areas and under different scenarios:
- Deep indoor (14 sub-campaigns), for basements and deep enclosed spaces
- Indoor (48 sub-campaigns), for houses and multi-floor buildings
- Outdoor Walking (8 sub-campaigns), for outdoor while walking
- Outdoor Driving (14 sub-campaigns), for outdoor while on public transport
The measurement campaign in Rome covered a period of six and a half weeks (during December ‘20 and January ‘21). Likewise, measurements cover a variety of different scenarios, however, the number of campaigns across the two technologies are different:
LTE:
- Indoor (106 sub-campaigns), for houses and multi-floor buildings
- Outdoor Static (17 sub-campaigns), for outdoor while static and maintaining LoS to the eNodeB
- Outdoor Walking (49 sub-campaigns), for outdoor while walking
- Outdoor Driving (39 sub-campaigns), for outdoor while on public transport
NB-IoT:
- Indoor (21 sub-campaigns), for houses and multi-floor buildings
- Outdoor Static (17 sub-campaigns), for outdoor while static and maintaining LoS to the eNodeB
- Outdoor Walking (24 sub-campaigns), for outdoor while walking
- Outdoor Driving (33 sub-campaigns), for outdoor while on public transport
A subset of the measurements is replicated over time (i.e., morning vs. afternoon vs. evening, and week vs. weekend), to account for temporal effects.
For more details on the data collection, dataset fields and visualization of the data, please see: https://mosaic-simulamet.com/nbiotcoverage/. Here you can also find the analysis of the Oslo data in terms of technology, operator, and scenario comparison.
Your task with this assignment is to dig deeper and provide coverage performance comparison for different scenarios in time and space. You can select any of the below scenarios (or their combination) for your analysis:
- Given a selected number of different campaigns, compare the coverage performance for different operators and different technologies (NB-IoT and LTE) in Oslo and Rome.
- Given a selected number of different campaigns, compare the deployment strategies for different operators and different technologies (NB-IoT and LTE) in Oslo and Rome.
- Given two or more campaigns at the same location (e.g., repetitions of indoor or deep indoor campaigns), show how the coverage changes over time. Is this change significant? (Do this for a given operator and for a given radio technology)
- Given a region where we have both (deep) indoor and outdoor measurements, compare the indoor coverage with the outdoor coverage. (Do this for a given operator)
Presentation
- Make a visual classroom representation, in the spirit of a short lecture. Select a tool such as Powerpoint or Google Slides which allows you to download and hand in complete assignments. Tools to present results more interactively (Matlab, Jupyter Notebook) are great in many contexts but not for delivery as homework. Deliver a PDF version of your presentation as well.
- The presentation must:
- explain the goals of your analysis
- explain which scenarios you have chosen to analyze, and how you approached the analyses
- present your results visually using plots (there are many examples in the intro lecture)
- explain the results
- explain how the plots assist you in explaining these results
- Present in the classroom.
- The presentation that you deliver is not a report. It should be very brief (using bullets) for each requested explanation. The oral presentation in the classroom should be more detailed.
- It is important to use statistical tools and enough samples to make your case, as real measurements always have measurement noise.
Deadline
The presentation must be submitted on November 16 at 12:00 (before the course starts).