Abstract
LoRaWAN is a flagship Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology that has highly attracted much attention from the community in recent years. Many LoRaWAN end-devices, such as sensors or actuators, are expected not to be powered by the electricity grid; therefore, it is crucial to investigate the energy consumption of LoRaWAN. However, published works have only focused on this topic to a limited extent. In this paper, we present analytical models that allow the characterization of LoRaWAN end-device current consumption, lifetime and energy cost of data delivery. The models, which have been derived based on measurements on a currently prevalent LoRaWAN hardware platform, allow us to quantify the impact of relevant physical and Medium Access Control (MAC) layer LoRaWAN parameters and mechanisms, as well as Bit Error Rate (BER) and collisions, on energy performance. Among others, evaluation results show that an appropriately configured LoRaWAN end-device platform powered by a battery of 2400 mAh can achieve a 1-year lifetime while sending one message every 5 min, and an asymptotic theoretical lifetime of 6 years for infrequent communication.
Highlights
Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) define a category of wireless communication technologies that have recently gained significant momentum
We assume a periodic behavior for the LoRaWAN end-device, we model its current consumption during one period
This is consistent with the submillisecond latency of payload transmission from the the end-device radio is turned on for possible incoming data units, until the second receive window is microcontroller to the radio interface, for the range of payload sizes in LoRaWAN, that is typical of Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI)
Summary
Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) define a category of wireless communication technologies that have recently gained significant momentum. Among LPWAN technologies, LoRaWAN (and its related modulation, LoRa), is perhaps the technology that has attracted the attention of most academic work as of the writing of this paper [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26] This can be explained by the public availability of its specifications [27], the availability of certified hardware [28] and the fact that LoRaWAN communication can be enabled without the need to establish a relationship with an operator.
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