Comparing the Performance of NB-IoT, LTE Cat-M1, Sigfox, and LoRa for IoT End Devices Moving at High Speeds in the Air

Abstract

Recently, NB-IoT, LTE Cat-M1, Sigfox, and LoRa have been proposed as promising Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) technologies for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. These technologies are aimed for IoT applications such as smart meters that can tolerate long transmission delays and only need a narrow band to periodically transmit a small amount of data. Although the performances of these technologies have been studied or compared in the literature, most comparisons were conducted in non-mobile conditions. In this work, we used a drone flying at 70 km/hr along a 10 km motorway to act as a mobile IoT end device to do the performance measurements. In this paper, we report and compare the performances of these technologies in such high-speed mobile conditions in the air.