Demystifying low-power wide-area communications for city IoT applications

Abstract

Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) communication technologies have the potential to provide a step change in the enablement of cost-effective and energy efficient Internet of Things (IoT) applications. With an increase in the number of offerings available the real performance of these emerging technologies remain unclear. That is, each technology comes with its own advantages and limitations; yet there is a lack of comparative studies that examine their trade-offs based on empirical evidence. This poses a major challenge to IoT solution architects and developers in selecting an appropriate technology for an envisioned IoT application in a given deployment context.In this paper, we look beyond data sheets and white papers of LPWA communication technologies and provide insights into the performance of three emerging LPWA solutions based on real world experiments with different traffic loads and in different urban deployment contexts. Under the context of this study, specialized hardware was created to incorporate the different technologies and provide scientific quantitative and qualitative information related to data rates, success rates, transmission mode energy and power consumption, and communication ranges. The results of experimentation highlight the practicalities of placing LPWA technologies in real spaces and provide guidelines to IoT solution developers in terms of LPWA technology selection. Overall aim is to facilitate the design of new LPWA technologies and adaptive communication strategies that inform future IoT platforms.

Collision Resolution Protocol for Delay and Energy Efficient LoRa Networks

“…The algorithm uses the frame length present in each frame to truncate the frames to their correct length. Finally, the algorithm outputs are (2,2,6,4,4) and (6, 0, 4, 6, 2), as expected.…”

“…Long-range low-power communication technologies such as LoRa [1], Sigfox [2], and Ingenu [3], are becoming widely used in Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) [4], [5], [6]. These technologies enable to cover extensive zones with very low energy consumption and are thus attractive technologies for supporting the future Internet of Things (IoT) communications and applications, in particular environmental monitoring [7], [8], [9].…”

Resource Allocation in Wireless Powered IoT Networks

“…The user harvests P H m,n (k) amount of power, and the optimal policy in time slot k π * k = 0 12 IoT user U m,n transmits data to the gateway with the transmit power from π * k at time slot k 13 Update the available power P A m,n (k + 1) in the battery through (1)…”

Reliability or Sustainability

“…For this reasons, the contemporary Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies [Moyer 2015], which are mostly single hop, can be considered as the most appropriate communication approaches. The current paper considers a single hop communication infrastructure based on LPWA technologies and uses the experimental results of [Kartakis et al 2016a] to setup the evaluation parameter, such as communication energy consumption. Specifically, the parameters of XBee868 [Digi 2015] were used which implements the Zigbee protocol for long ranges over 868MHz.…”

“…60.2 kJ). Based on WaterBox sensing device hardware [Kartakis et al 2015] and the real experiments of LPWA communication technologies as conducted in [Kartakis et al 2016a], the energy consumption for in-node operations E in i (t) and E tr i (t) for each node i at every interval t are set as random variables with averages of 6 J and 30 J respectively.…”