NB-IoT Versus LoRaWAN: An Experimental Evaluation for Industrial Applications
- 15 April 2020
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
- Vol. 16 (12), 7802-7811
- https://doi.org/10.1109/tii.2020.2987423
Abstract
Low power and long-range communications are crucial features of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm that is becoming essential even for industrial applications. Today, the most promising long-range communication technologies are LoRaWAN and Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT), which are driving a large IoT ecosystem. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of LoRaWAN and NB-IoT with accurate in-field measurements using the same application context for a fair comparison in terms of energy efficiency, lifetime, quality of service, and coverage. The NB-IoT energy transmission is scarcely dependent on the payload length. Thus applications that can tolerate buffering and caching techniques on the node are favored. On the other hand, LoRaWAN consumes 10x lower energy compared to NB-IoT for occasional and latency-sensitive communications, for which it enables much end-device lifetime. Finally, this paper provides design guidelines for future industrial applications with stringent requirements of long-range and low power wireless connectivity.Keywords
Funding Information
- Italian Ministry for Education
- University and Research
- Dipartimenti di Eccellenza
- Office of Naval Research Global (ONRG-NICOP-N62909-19-1-2018)
- Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (40B2-0_187087)
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