Cell Acquisition and Synchronization for Unlicensed NB-IoT

Sammanfattning: Narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT) is a new wireless technology designed to support cellular networks with wide coverage for a massive number of very cheap low power user devices. Studies have been initiated for deployment of NB-IoT in unlicensed frequency bands, some of which demand the use of a frequency-hopping scheme with a short channel dwell time. In order for a device to connect to a cell, it must synchronize well within the dwell time in order to decode the frequency-hopping pattern. Due to the significant path loss, the narrow bandwidth and the device characteristics, decreasing the synchronization time is a challenge. This thesis studies different methods to decrease the synchronization time for NB-IoT without increasing the demands on the user device. The study shows how artificial fast fading can be combined with denser reference signalling in order to achieve improvements to the cell acquisition and synchronization procedure sufficient for enabling unlicensed operation of NB-IoT.