System Level Evaluation for NB-IoT Satellite Communications

Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networking has emerged as a major communication mean for the Internet of Things (IoT) but currently relies only on terrestrial waves. However, for IoT applications in remote areas, Satellite-based IoT services could provide a dependable alternative. This paper evaluates the system performance of Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT), a 3GPP standard which is one of the major terrestrial IoT technology, for Geostationary (GEO) and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. Despite lower visibility times and Doppler levels, LEO systems present the best performance in terms of latency of access and density the network can accommodate.