# User Utility Maximization in Narrowband Internet of Things for Prioritized Healthcare Applications
## 2 Related Works  
According to various studies, the healthcare industry utilized radio communication technologies in a variety of ways as it approached advancements in care and rehabilitation. The Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN) was one of the most promising concepts; it consisted of a network of sensor nodes worn on the body, capable of capturing, analyzing, and wirelessly transmitting one or more types of physiological or environmental information [13]. Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), also known as a body sensor network (WBSN), allowed for health monitoring everywhere on the human body at any time [14]. On the other hand, IEEE 802.15.6 provided low-power, short-range, and extremely dependable wireless communication within the body's surrounding area [15]. For short-, medium-, and long-range communications, WBSNs could communicate with other networks by a number of wireless protocols such as ZigBee, Bluetooth, Ultra-Wide Band, Wireless LAN (Wi-Fi), WiMAX, etc. [15]. Their uncertainty of battery lifetime and short range communication are the major disadvantages [13], which prompted the introduction of low-power, wide-area network technology (LPWAN) for healthcare applications, such as LoRa, Sigfox, and NB-IoT. According to [2; 6], while the unlicensed LoRa and Sigfox technologies focused only on supporting low-cost applications in an energy-efficient way, the NB-IoT is directed to augment high QoS and low latency. The problem of maximizing utility considering rate maximization or interference mitigation or access prioritization to the application in an NB-IoT based healthcare system has been categorized into two groups. These are: the basic operation of NB-IoT and resource management in NB-IoT-based healthcare applications. This section epitomizes state-of-the-art papers covering both of these groups. A real-time application of a patients' health status monitoring system based on theIoT was discussed in [1] with a brief overview. This work aimed to automatically provide suggestions to the patient according to his health condition. According to their analysis, a licensed frequency supported cellular network (e.g., NB-IoT) ensures reliable and efficient communication in the healthcare system. An intelligent medical plan was based on NB-IoT technology and a smart hospital information management system was developed and explored in [4]. The study in [5] explored the aspect of the physical and medium access control (MAC) layer issues of NB-IoT in detail. The authors elaborately discuss synchronous and asynchronous networks elongated with the 5G network. They derive theories for resource allocation, link adaptation, coverage, and capacity issues for specific NB-IoT-based applications, such as healthcare, smart meters, smart grids, etc. Furthermore, a continual survey of Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies of LoRa and NB-IoT in [6] is also discussed broadly with their basic specification for different services such as IoT industries (Smart Agriculture), public services (Smart metering), personal services (healthcare), etc. The long-range (LoRa), as an unlicensed LPWAN technology, has some advantages in battery lifetime, cost, and capacity, whereas the licensed NB-IoT technology offers efficiency in terms of QoS, latency, reliability, and coverage range. They compared and described the technical differences of LoRa and NB-IoT, where the key aspects consist of physical features, network architecture, MAC evaluation, several IoT applications, QoS,lifetime, and latency. In the paper, IoT cases studies were widely categorized as _IoT personal_, _IoT public_, _IoT industries_, and _IoT appliances_. Additionally, it focused on how the network deployment for various applications such as smart agriculture, smart metering, and smart healthcare using NB-IoT will deliver future low-cost services in hard-to-reach areas. This paper also presented the cases of successful implementations of diverse applications in different countries, mainly in Korea, Japan, and China.