Abstract
The spectrum of Internet of Things (IoT) applications is exponentially growing, driving the demand for better energy performance metrics. In conjunction, Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) have evolved as long-range connectivity enabler with low management cost. The integration of LPWAN communication assists in reliable IoT operation with extended lifetime. Notable LPWAN technologies that contend for many of the IoT applications are LoRaWAN, DASH7, Sigfox, and NB-IoT. Most of the end-devices such as sensors and actuators are battery powered, therefore investigating energy consumption becomes crucial. To estimate the consumed power, it is important to analyze the energy consumption in wireless communication. This paper describes an empirical evaluation of energy consumption for LPWAN wireless technologies. We measure the current consumption of LoRaWAN, DASH7, Sigfox, and NB-IoT and derive the respective battery lifetime. These measurements help to quantify the energy performance of different protocols. We observe that LoRaWAN and DASH7 are more energy efficient when compared to Sigfox and NB-IoT. Finally, a case study on energy consumption is done on precision agriculture in the greenhouse, showing that battery lifetime in real applications can drop significantly from the ideal case. These results can be used for increasing the effectiveness of the IoT application by selecting the right technology and battery capacity.
Highlights
The Internet of Things (IoT), has gained a high momentum [1] in both industry and research community providing ease of exchange of data between application devices and sensors
Technologies [5,8] shows that LoRaWAN and Sigfox are advantageous in terms of battery lifetime as compared with NB-IoT
Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) technologies are limited by system regulation of the duty-cycle, which restricts the number of message transmission
Summary
The Internet of Things (IoT), has gained a high momentum [1] in both industry and research community providing ease of exchange of data between application devices and sensors. Wide range of data acquisition devices are already a part of IoT applications that significantly consider long range communication with low energy consumption to prolong the lifetime of the network without human intervention. Thereby, these demands have driven the emergence of. Sensors 2020, 20, 4794 momentum [5], mainly because of its set of features like wide range, scalable deployment, highly energy efficient, and inexpensive in regards to the cost of management, operation, and radio chip-set It provides the link range of one to multiple kilometers with support of connecting thousands of end-devices to the infrastructure (gateway) [5].
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