Multi-RAT LPWAN in Smart Cities: Trial of LoRaWAN and NB-IoT Integration

Abstract

The landscape of the contemporary IoT radio access technologies (RATs) is excessively diverse, especially when it comes to such a complex environment as Smart City. On the one hand, this diversity offers operators sufficient flexibility to select the most appropriate RAT for their target application. On the other, it becomes a severe limiting factor, as it leads to high level of uncertainty for the IoT device vendors, who need to decide, which technology to support in their hardware. In this paper, we consider the provisioning of the low-power wide area network (LPWAN) devices with multiple RATs. First, we briefly discuss the parameters of several potential radio technologies, and analyze the pros and cons of combining them in a single device. Next, we prototype a real-life device capable of communicating via two perspective LPWAN technologies, namely, LoRaWAN and NB-IoT, and report the initial results of our performance evaluation. These results confirm the feasibility of instrumenting a dual-mode device as well as reveal several important aspects related to the development of multi-radio devices and their performance. In our view, due to their higher flexibility, reliability, and dependability, the devices such as the one developed can be beneficial for various Smart City applications, with smart energy grids and road traffic control being just two of many examples.

A Multimodal Localization Framework Design for IoT Applications

“…Mikhaylov et al experimented with a multi-RAT IoT device that transmits packets through a public Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) network and a private LoRaWAN network. With this device, they demonstrate that multi-RAT LPWAN enables more reliable communication because of the ubiquitous network coverage and decreased packet loss [3]. Furthermore, they established that multi-RAT can improve the energy efficiency of IoT devices [4].…”

A Survey of LoRaWAN for IoT: From Technology to Application

“…Different heterogeneous application can benefit by on-the-fly smart selection of communication technology based on their requirements. To this end, LoRaWAN is seen as one of the possible technology, that, in addition to other technologies such as Wi-Fi, NB-IoT, SigFox or other LPWANs, can improve flexibility and reliability of the communication [ 24 , 111 , 112 , 127 , 128 , 129 , 130 , 131 ].…”

“…In [ 127 ], a dual-technology (LoRaWAN and NB-IoT) node was prototyped and its communication feasibility over both networks was demonstrated. The NB-IoT network can be used for emergency traffic or to close the loop for auction downlink traffic in different use-cases.…”

An Empirical Modelling for the Baseline Energy Consumption of an NB-IoT Radio Transceiver

“…Several works have evaluated NB-IoT technology in terms of its UE's power consumption analysis and battery life-time estimations [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] that can be categorized into analytical, simulations, and experimental measurements based analysis. Most of these works provide analytical models with simulation based energy estimations [6]- [14].…”

“…The authors in [19] claim to provide the first publicly available empirical power consumption measurements for the NB-IoT devices but their measurement setup is emulated using a Keysight UXM, a standard-compliant NB-IoT BS emulator; so, it is unclear to what extent their results would map onto a real network. Similarly, the work in [21] proposes a Dual-RAT LPWAN node combining an NB-IoT and LoRaWAN radio into one node with all the necessary power regulator circuitry. Here too, the power consumption numbers for the whole node are given where the individual power graphs for each radio and their internal state details are missing.…”