Five Years of 3GPP NB-IoT Technology: What Are the Main Use Cases?

In Release 13 of 3GPP standards, published in December 2016, the Narrow-Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) technology is introduced as the first technology that addresses the massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) requirements. Mobile network operators (MNOs) started introducing NB-IoT service starting from early 2018. After five years of its lifetime, in this work, we investigate if the NB-IoT standard lived towards its expectations. We provide a short but clear overview of NB-IoT standard focusing on the main aspects of uplink short packet delivery. With this background and technology-specific limitations, we list and discuss the NB-IoT use cases that dominate in today's MNOs mMTC services.