Energy Harvesting in LoRaWAN: A Cost Analysis for the Industry 4.0

Exploiting the advantages brought by long-range radio communications and extremely low power consumptions, LoRaWAN is capable to support low rate industry 4.0 services. Despite being energy efficient, LoRa motes can still undergo frequent battery replenishments caused by the monitoring requirements of industrial applications. Duty-cycle constrained operations can partially face this issue at the expense of increased communication delays, which, in turn, inflate higher costs due to damaged products on the production line. This letter proposes a model to analyze this cost tradeoff against different sensing intervals. It further highlights the impact of energy harvesting sources on this cost relationship mapping a way toward improved production efficiency.