Abstract

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) are becoming the powerful communication technologies of the IoT of tomorrow. LoRaWAN, SigFox, and NB-IoT are the three competing LPWAN technologies. On the other hand, Smart Water Grid (SWG) is an emerging paradigm that promises to over come issues such as pipes leaks encountered by current water infrastructure by deploying smart devices into the water infrastructure for monitoring purposes. This paper firstly explores the physical and communication features of the above LPWAN technologies and provides a comprehensive comparison between them as well as their suitability for the Smart Water Grid (SWG) use case. The important aspect of SWG is to connect devices such as smart water meters and other tiny devices like sensors installed into the water pipelines for the system monitoring purpose. We consider Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) also called Smart Water Metering when dealing with the water grid, which is the main application of SWG and we study the scalability of LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, and SigFox in such application. Under NS3, the simulation results show that NB-IoT provides the best scalability compared to LoRaWAN and SigFox and thus is able to support a huge number of devices with a low packet error rate.

Highlights

  • The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to connect more than 50 billion devices by 2020 in smart cities applications such as Smart Water Grid (SWG), Smart Electrical Grid, Smart Home, etc

  • In this paper: (1) we provide the various communication requirements of SWG, (2) we present the physical and communication features of LoRaWAN, SigFox, and NB-IoT, (3) we compare these technologies in terms of SWG communication requirements, (4) we study the scalability of these technologies for SWG infrastructure

  • NB-IoT operates in licensed bands and uses synchronous communication based on LTE

Read more

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to connect more than 50 billion devices by 2020 in smart cities applications such as Smart Water Grid (SWG), Smart Electrical Grid, Smart Home, etc. Cellular networks provide long-range connectivity but these technologies deplete quickly the batteries life of devices installed into water grid during communications processes. In 2016, NB-IoT was used by Vodafone and Huawei to test data transmission in smart water metering application These network operators had integrated NB-IoT in Spanish Vodafone to send a message to a device installed into water meter by following NB-IoT specifications [2]. The remainder of this paper is structured as follow: Section II provides the communication requirements of SWG while section III presents briefly the three competing LPWANs. Section IV compares LoRaWAN, SigFox and NB-IoT in terms of SWG communication requirements.

Power consumption
Scalability
Low cost
Reliability
Communication range
LoRaWAN
SigFox
NB-IoT
COMPARISON BETWEEN LPWANS IN TERMS OF SWG
Latency
Quality of Service
Communication range and coverage
SCALABILITY ANALYSIS IN AMI
VIII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
RELATED WORKS
CONCLUSION
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call