NB-IoT Support in OSS ASN.1 Tools

Ready for NB-IoT? OSS is here to help. Standardized by 3GPP, this narrow band radio technology is a stepping stone towards 5G. In the next few years, billions of intelligent devices will be connected to wireless networks. While NB-IoT will provide a ubiquitous platform for devices, ranging from mobile phones to automobiles, from tiny sensors to smart buildings, from wearables to complex medical devices, it will also pose challenges to solution providers. Not only will they need to provide mission-critical reliable low-latency services, but they will also need to support resource-constrained devices.

For several decades, OSS has been an ASN.1 industry leader, providing solutions for mission-critical and high-reliability applications. Super-fast, ultra-small, and industry-proven OSS ASN.1 codecs have been deployed in thousands of telecommunication, aviation, financial, and security applications. As the world is ready to embark on NB-IoT, OSS is ready with its solutions to contribute to NB-IoT adoption. In support of  RRC, S1, X2, and NAS protocol implementations, OSS offers a comprehensive NB-IoT development platform which includes  our ASN.1 Tools, S1/X2 ASN.1 API, and NAS Encoder/Decoder Tools.

The RRC ASN.1 specification is huge because it contains many messages addressing the needs of all application areas including NB-IoT. NB-IoT applications need to support only a subset of all these messages. The highly efficient design of the OSS ASN.1 codecs in conjunction with the compiler directives helps you to achieve an extremely small codec footprint. NB-IoT specific messages are specified in a separate ASN.1 module. The OSS ASN.1 Tools can be instructed to generate the codec only for those messages. You can further fine-tune the codec if your application has to encode and/or decode only a few of messages. For your convenience, the OSS ASN.1 Tools include sample programs to demonstrate the encoding/decoding of NB-IoT messages. These samples can be found in the subdirectories under the samples/standards directory of the shipments. The Tools include many other valuable features such as custom memory management, multi-threading support, rich debugging and diagnostic capabilities, etc.

In the S1 and X2 NB-IoT protocols, existing procedures/messages have been updated and new procedures have been added to support CP/UP CIoT (Control/User Plane Cellular IoT) optimizations, to convey information on the CE (Coverage Enhancement) and eDRX (Extended Discontinuous Reception) capabilities of the UE, etc. You can review the respective samples in the shipment of the OSS ASN.1 Tools to learn how you can work with the S1/X2 procedures/messages in your application. In addition, OSS offers an S1/X2 ASN.1 API, add-on to the OSS ASN.1/C Tools, for application level processing of  S1/X2 ASN.1 messages. The API supports NB-IoT specific procedures and messages, and can give you a jumpstart to your S1/X2 development.

The NAS Encoder/Decoder Tools, available on various platforms, is a tool that facilitates the creation, encoding, decoding, and processing of NAS messages. The NAS Encoder/Decoder library takes care of all of the unique aspects of NAS message serialization such as, required and optional information elements, bit-level format of each type of information element, bit order, half-octet order, and so on. The latest release of these tools support 3GPP Release 13 and can be used to work with the NAS messages in your NB-IoT supporting UEs and MMEs.

Moreover to meet the many and varied requirements of NB-IoT, the market will be flooded with many new hardware platforms. Porting your solutions to new platforms will be a daunting task. The highly portable OSS ASN.1 codec (ported to 500+ platforms) will help you rapidly switch to a new platform, accelerating your time-to-commercialize, optimizing cost, and giving you an edge over your competition.

Let’s make NB-IoT happen together! You can download a trial of the OSS solutions mentioned in this blog. If you need more information about how you can use the OSS solutions to meet your NB-IoT requirements, please contact OSS at info@oss.com.