Experimental Evaluation on NB-IoT and LoRaWAN for Industrial and IoT Applications

Low power and long-range communications are essential features of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm that is becoming widespread across a spectrum of industrial applications. In this paper, we present performance evaluation of the most promising long-range communication technologies, namely LoRaWAN and NB-IoT. We present accurate in-field measurements using a monitoring application as a testbench for a fair comparison in terms of energy efficiency and lifetime. Experimental results highlight that NB-IoT payload length does not impact on transmission energy. Thus, applications that implement buffering and caching techniques are favored. On the other hand, LoRaWAN consumes 10× less energy to transmit a payload equivalent to that of NB-IoT, thereby allowing longer end-device lifetime.