These devices are conceived for a different class of point to point communication that operates with a high power consumption and possesses high design complexity leading to implementation cost and deployment difficulty [2]. Beside this, protocols such as ZigBee, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth proffer short coverage communication and demand low power consumption, but if deployed continually would cost more. Therefore, this is not a cost-effective solution for applications with wide coverage requirements such as MIoT devices that need to support large-scale connections with low power consumption at reduced cost, and provide wide coverage over LTE and GSM networks as illustrated in Figure 1.  
In recent years, different IoT standardization bodies have proposed different technologies to accommodate the requirements of IoT applications in current and future cellular networks. Specifically, a novel cellular-based low power wide-area (LPWA) IoT technology, known as the narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) system, has been standardized by the third Generation Partnership Project (3 GPP), where the most recent release is dedicated to serve some part of fifth-generation (5G) technology [3]. Table 1 below, presents the technical specification of LPWA network technology. To improve the NB-IoT LPWA specification, release-14 of the 3 GPP is supplemented with features relevant for mMTC use case where device positioning/localization, as well as cell search improvement are introduced, which focuses on high peak data rates with UE power allocation of 23 dBm and enhanced cell ID [4]. Release-14 integrates NB-IoT into 5G in addition to low latency reduction, new wake-up receiver design for higher density support, improved operation, and multiple Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) feedback, which realizes better throughput with repetitive transmission. In NB-IoT, multiple associated control signaling with repeating transmission data have been utilized as the main solution to achieve extended network coverage for NB-IoT systems. Other literature on NB-IoT takes into consideration the new feature of repetition. Besides that, some methods consider performing a link adaptation for resource management to enhance data rate and power reduction. In addition, coverage efficiency through link adaptation, and modulation and coding scheme (MCS) index selection are considered in existing LTE technology, as well as the determination of the appropriate number of repetitions [5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10; 11; 12]. Figure 1: Classification of LPWAN networks based on data rate and signal range. Wireless IoT systems are expected to offer coverage reachability of about 164 dB, battery life of 10 years, coverage density to support up to 10 million devices in a square km\({}^{2}\), and a system throughput of 200 bps with processing latencies lower than 10 s [13; 14]. Hence, choosing a suitable PHY layer technology is essential to meet the requirement. However, as specified in the 3 GPP standard, NB-IoT is designed based on existing LTE PHY layer technology, with its baseband signals and channels inherited from LTE with additional repetition parameters to meet the demand. In the uplink technology, NB-IoT adopted LTE turbo coding as FEC and SC-FDMA as the multiplexing scheme [15; 16] due to its advantage of Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) that results from efficient power amplification compared to ordinary OFDMA technology. The main goal of Forward Error Correction (FEC) is to improve the transmission reliability with which user data may be conveyed through a noisy channel, such as a wireless communication channel or an imperfect information system. This is achieved by the addition of redundant information derived from the data to be conveyed prior to transmission over the noisy channel [17]. At the destination, the redundant bit of the transmitted data may be exploited in multiplex with the original information message to correct errors that may have been introduced by the channel [18].