Cooperative High-Rate and Low-Latency Transmission, Employing Two-Tier Narrow-Band Internet-of-Things and Bluetooth Low-Energy Networks

Abstract

Recently, narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT) networks have been on the rise in the IoT field due to their features like low power consumption and high penetration rate. However, NB-IoT’s main drawbacks are its high delays and low data rates. To address these problems, in this paper, we present a two-tier cooperative solution to improve network throughput. Two-tier networks generally consist of cellular and device-to-device (D2D) communications. In this work, we use NB-IoT for cellular networks and Bluetooth low energy (BLE) for D2D communications. By leveraging these communications technologies, we enable idle nodes in a group to assist target nodes download and upload data. In doing this, we aim to maximize throughput, minimize consumed energy, and maximize the total remaining capacity of the node group batteries. To tackle the faced multi-objective optimization problem, we used the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II). Only one group gets selected from the candidate groups by adjusting the level of node participation. Simulation results show a 7.7-fold growth of throughput against only an 8 percent increase in energy consumption compared to the baseline download scenario and a 7.6-fold growth of throughput against just a 2 percent increase in energy consumption compared to the baseline upload scenario.

Keywords

• BLE
• cooperative data transmission
• D2D
• NB-IoT
• NSGA-II
• two-tier networks