A Narrowband Internet-of-Things Communications Scheme Over Non-Terrestrial Networks

Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) based on emerging 5G New Radio (NR) technology stand as an effective solution to complement terrestrial networks in service provisioning, owing to their ability to satisfy requests for anywhere and anytime connection. This work concentrates on the power saving and battery lifetime of a User Equipment (UE) communicating with NTN. We consider NTN to support Narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT) applications in 5G networks. We model an NTN UE's Discontinuous Reception (DRX) as a Semi-Markovbased model. We assess the model's performance in terms of UE power consumption and average delay. We validate the proposed model through extensive simulations. The reduction of the number of signaling steps can also reduce the power consumption of the UE. In this line, we also compare the random access performance obtained with 3GPP compliant configuration and satellite configuration with the aim of studying the power consumption of the UE.