Comparison of LPWAN Technologies: Cost Structure and Scalability

Abstract

Small-scale commercial rollouts of Cellular-IoT (C-IoT) networks have started globally since last year. However, among the plethora of low power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies, the cost-effectiveness of C-IoT is not certain for IoT service providers, small and greenfield operators. Today, there is no known public framework for the feasibility analysis of IoT communication technologies. Hence, this paper first presents a generic framework to assess the cost structure of cellular and non-cellular LPWAN technologies. Then, we applied the framework in eight deployment scenarios to analyze the prospect of LPWAN technologies like Sigfox, LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, LTE-M, and EC-GSM. We consider the inter-technology interference impact on LoRaWAN and Sigfox scalability. Our results validate that a large rollout with a single technology is not cost-efficient. Also, our analysis suggests the rollout possibility of an IoT communication Technology may not be linear to cost-efficiency.

Quantifying the Economic and Financial Viability of NB-IoT and LoRaWAN Technologies: A Comprehensive Life Cycle Cost Analysis Using Pragmatic Computational Tools

“…Several studies have addressed the life cycle costs of various IoT communication technologies, including LoRaWAN and NB-IoT [28]. A big number of research works conclude that, among the plethora of low-power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies, the cost-effectiveness of IoT is not certain for IoT service solutions.…”

Resilient Edge: Building an Adaptive and Resilient Multi-Communication Network for IoT Edge Using LPWAN and WiFi

“…Chaudhari et al [46] provided a comprehensive survey on various LPWAN technologies and presented these technologies concerning application requirements, such as coverage, capacity, cost, low power, and deployment complexity, and provided a comprehensive survey on both standard and nonstandard LPWAN technologies. Hossain et al [47] presented the comparison of different LPWAN technologies in terms of cost structure and scalability and stated that a large rollout with a single LPWAN technology is not cost-efficient.…”

Surveying 5G Techno-Economic Research to Inform the Evaluation of 6G Wireless Technologies

“…Ultimately, these machines could be stationary sensors such as smart meters [92] or devices placed on other moving objects (or even living animals), such as for agricultural applications [124]. Techno-economic use case analysis suggests that designing dedicated cellular IoT networks purely for a single use case is not yet economically viable for many applications due to poor cost-efficiency, supporting the need for traffic aggregation across multiple different uses [125].…”