LPWAN Coverage Assessment Planning Without Explicit Knowledge of Base Station Locations

Abstract

An assessment of radio network coverage, usually in the form of a measurement campaign, is essential for multibase-station (multi-BS) network deployment and maintenance. It can be conducted by a network operator or its served consumers. However, the number of measurement points and their locations may not be known in advance for an efficient and accurate evaluation. The main goal of this study is to propose a new methodology for understanding the selection of measurement points during coverage and signal quality assessment. It is particularly tailored to multi-BS low-power widearea network (LPWAN) deployments without explicit knowledge of BS locations. To this aim, we first conduct a large-scale measurement campaign for three popular LPWAN technologies, namely, NB-IoT, Sigfox, and LoRaWAN. Utilizing this baseline data, we develop a procedure for identifying the minimum set of measurement points for the coverage assessment with a given accuracy as well as study which interpolation algorithms produce the lowest approximation error. Our results demonstrate that a random choice of measurement points is on par with their deterministic selection. Out of the candidate interpolation algorithms, Kriging method offers attractive performance in terms of the absolute error for NB-IoT deployments. By contrast, for Sigfox and LoRaWAN infrastructures, less complex techniques, such as Natural-neighbor, Linear interpolation, or Inverse-Distance Weighting, can achieve comparable (and occasionally even better) accuracy levels.

LoRa meets IP: a Container-based Architecture to Virtualize LoRaWAN End Nodes

“…LPWANs are designed to offer affordable connectivity to a large number of constrained devices distributed over large areas (e.g., different plants of the same production site). To this end, various LPWAN technologies are available, such as (just to name a few) Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) [13,14], Sigfox [15], and LoRa [16]. LoRa refers only to the physical (PHY) layer in the LPWAN stack and does not provide sufficient reliability mechanisms to be used as-is in IoT contexts.…”

Implementación de un sistema para evaluar la cobertura de la red sigfox en el interior de edificaciones

“…Figura 1. Mapa de cobertura de la red Sigfox en Ecuador (Sigfox, 2022) La evaluación de la cobertura de la red de inalámbrica es esencial para su diseño, despliegue y mantenimiento con múltiples estaciones base (Stusek et al, 2022) como es el caso de Sigfox. Por otra parte, es necesario contar con una herramienta que facilite el diseño de la red, con el propósito de asegurar que todos los objetos ubicados dentro de las edificaciones, a los cuales se conectan los nodos inalámbricos, puedan ser monitoreados además de facilitar la inspección del sitio en el que se realiza antes de la implementación de la red, actividad muy común en el diseño e implementación de comunicaciones inalámbricas.…”

IoTMapper: A Metrics Aggregation System Architecture in Support of Smart City Solutions

“…They then presented a doubly stochastic Markov chain model, from the time-dependent statistical characteristics, demonstrating that such an approach may be used for the optimization of modern LPWAN technologies, given a set of collected data on the deployments. A coverage assessment method was presented in [ 25 ]. This assessment starts with a large-scale measurement campaign for NB-IoT, Sigfox, and LoRaWAN.…”