NB-IoT Versus LoRaWAN: An Experimental Evaluation for Industrial Applications

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 10× 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.

A Survey of Industrial Internet of Things Platforms for Establishing Centralized Data-Acquisition Middleware: Categorization, Experiment, and Challenges

“…Short-distance local networks such as Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and ZigBee are also available. Recently, many industry sites have attempted to apply low-power wide-area networks (LPWAN), including Long Range (LoRa) and Sigfox, which are specialized for IoT and support small data transfer with low-power consumption [17][18][19][20][21][22]. In contrast to wired communication, wireless communication must guarantee stable data acquisition and control.…”

Structural Health Monitoring system with Narrowband IoT and MEMS sensors

“…The NB-IoT's power consumption depends on multiple environment-related factors, such as the country and network operator settings, which can drastically change the end-device performance. NB-IoT is standardized by 3GPP for LPWANs thanks to its capability to work virtually everywhere (e.g., TIM guarantees a country level coverage in Italy for NB-IoT) [9]. The maximum payload for each message is 1500 B, and the full data transmission rate is limited to 20 kbps uplink and 200 kbps downlink.…”

“…In comparison with LoRaWAN, or other LPWAN protocols, the NB-IoT requires more energy per packet in general. However, due to its larger payload and its national licensed connectivity, the energy per bit from the sensor to the cloud is the best in class for the LPWAN category [9]. NB-IoT protocol has no restriction on band utilization because it uses licensed LTE bands, so there is no limitation on the number of bytes sent in a single connection to the cell.…”

“…After the exploration of the most suitable NB-IoT module and configuration, the hardware design of the complete SHM node is discussed in this section. Recent works in the literature have already investigated the sensor front-end [13], and the wireless connectivity [9], providing fundamental hardware specifications. In fact, as the major problems of commercial SHM systems are the high sensor and installation cost, we combined MEMS sensor micro-vibration requirements [13] with an LPWAN transceiver [9].…”

“…Moreover, such sensors are also suitable for short-term structural monitoring applications, exploiting single clusters of devices for multiple buildings. Previous works have pointed out that, concerning power consumption, coverage, and security, LoRaWAN [7] and NB-IoT [8], [9] are the most suited LPWAN protocols in distributed IoT applications.…”