A comparative evaluation of lora and NB-IoT technologies in a real environment

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has already intruded into people‘s lives, as its primary purpose is to create a new digital world by interconnecting the different devices together. Sensors and actuators are all collaborating together in order to offer intelligent services to a number of users. Consequently, smart environments were created such as smart homes, smart cities etc. Many IoT applications were invented in order to support this remarkable evolution. However, the IoT requires some high technical demands in order to operate well and offer its services. These demands involve a long battery lifetime, low latency in order to inform immediately, low battery consumption in order to attain the long battery lifetime, massive number of connections, low cost and in some cases a long transmission range with uninterrupted connectivity, and high throughput. The current wireless technologies cannot support this evolution since they offer high data rates with the cost of short range, or they offer acceptable data rates with the cost of a high battery drain and high device costs. Consequently, LPWAN technologies were created in order to serve this remarkable growth since they can accomplish all of the IoT demands. They are separated into two groups, those that transmit in an unlicensed spectrum such as Lora, Sigfox etc and those that transmit in a licensed spectrum such as NB-IoT, LTE-M etc. Each technology cannot serve all of the IoT applications requirements and therefore each one was created in order to serve specific kinds. This project focuses on two Wide Area Networking technologies, namely Lora and NB-IOT, since they are the most popular technologies in industrial and research communities. Both technologies offer security, confidentiality, low power consumption, low latency, mobility and long transmission range in contrast to other LPWAN technologies which don not offer all ofs the above. More precisely, this project analyses the two technologies and compares their technological similarities and dissimilarities. Further, some experiments were performed in a real environment in order to confirm some of their specifications and find which technology is more appropriate for which application domain. Also as a means of an example, it is shown that both technologies are capable to be used into the near future and create a smart city.