Modeling and Optimization of 5G NR - Cellular IoT Coexistence Through Dynamic Spectrum Sharing

Due to the growing number of interconnected Internet of Things (IoT) devices along with a greater prevalence of data-intensive 5G applications, it has become increasingly clear that we need efficient methods to share a finite bandwidth among our growing needs. In this work, we examine the coexistence of these two types of applications and propose a method through which to improve its efficiency. To this end, we model the performance of NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT) latency and 5G New Radio (NR) throughput for IoT and 5G applications performance, respectively. Using these models, we formulate two methods through which to statically divide bandwidth between the two networks. Furthermore, we provide a Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) scheme, allowing NB-IoT users to opportunistically utilize unused 5G spectrum, minimizing unused spectrum. Finally, we reconsider the static bandwidth division methods with our DSS scheme enabled, showing that the addition of our scheme allows more bandwidth to be allocated to the 5G network, resulting in a higher tolerance for variance in the notoriously volatile 5G traffic distributions.