Random Access Preamble Design and Detection for 3GPP Narrowband IoT Systems

Narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) is an emerging cellular technology that will provide improved coverage for massive number of low-throughput low-cost devices with low device power consumption in delay-tolerant applications. A new single tone signal with frequency hopping has been designed for NB-IoT physical random access channel (NPRACH). In this letter we describe this new NPRACH design and explain in detail the design rationale. We further propose possible receiver algorithms for NPRACH detection and time-of-arrival estimation. Simulation results on NPRACH performance including detection rate, false alarm rate, and time-of-arrival estimation accuracy are presented to shed light on the overall potential of NB-IoT systems.