A comparative study of LPWAN technologies for large-scale IoT deployment

By Kais Mekki, E. Bajic, F. Chaxel, Fernand Meyer. ICT express, 2019

1,351 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract By 2020, more than 50 billion devices will be connected through radio communications. In conjunction with the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) market, low power wide area networks (LPWAN) have become a popular low-rate long-range radio communication technology. Sigfox, LoRa, and NB-IoT are the three leading LPWAN technologies that compete for large-scale IoT deployment. This paper provides a comprehensive and comparative study of these technologies, which serve as efficient solutions to connect smart, autonomous, and heterogeneous devices. We show that Sigfox and LoRa are advantageous in terms of battery lifetime, capacity, and cost. Meanwhile, NB-IoT offers benefits in terms of latency and quality of service. In addition, we analyze the IoT success factors of these LPWAN technologies, and we consider application scenarios and explain which technology is the best fit for each of these scenarios.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e0dd6ac8516de0e072f20604a988f6deab9568d6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Networks and Communications

1. Syed Ali Hassan
2. Emerson Navarro
3. Attilio Toscano
4. Wei Feng
5. Ekram Hossain
6. Zibin Zheng
7. Ning Ge
8. Ramide Dantas

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Wei Feng
2. Ekram Hossain
3. Zibin Zheng
4. Ning Ge
5. Syed Ali Hassan
6. Jianhua Lu
7. Lei Shu
8. Yunfei Chen

Citations in the corpus

• Smart Water Management Platform: IoT-Based Precision Irrigation for Agriculture (2019, methodology): “• Layer 1: Device & Communication: a variety of sensor and actuator technologies to acquire soil (e.g., moisture), plant (e.g., growing stage) and weather (e.g., air temperature), as well as LPWAN communication technologies (e.g., LoRaWAN [28]) are abstracted in this layer.”
• Internet of Things for the Future of Smart Agriculture: A Comprehensive Survey of Emerging Technologies (2021, background): “1) SigFox: is an LPWAN network operator that provides a complete IoT connectivity solution based on its proprietary technologies [80].”
• Machine Learning for Resource Management in Cellular and IoT Networks: Potentials, Current Solutions, and Open Challenges (2019, background): “In most of the cases, the networks are characterized with a large number of nodes and the collisions among packets are avoided through scheduling and duty cycling [33].”
• Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks for the Maritime Internet of Things: Key Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges (2019, background): “NB-IoT has higher-reliability due to less interference in the licensed band, while its power consumption is higher than the other two technologies with a coverage of approximately 10 km [248].”
• A Systematic Review of IoT Solutions for Smart Farming (2020, background): “However, they have a high power consumption [35] and costs for However, they have a high power consumption [35] and costs for licensing [34]. licensing [34].”
• Blockchain for Internet of Things: A Survey (2019, background): “wide area networks (LPWANs) technologies including Sigfox, LoRa, narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), and industrial Ethernet [11].”