Analytical Modeling and Experimental Validation of NB-IoT Device Energy Consumption

The recent standardization of 3GPP Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) paves the way to support low-power wide-area (LPWA) use cases in cellular networks. NB-IoT design goals are extended coverage, low power and low cost devices, and massive connections. As a new radio access technology, it is necessary to analyze the possibilities NB-IoT provides to support different traffic and coverage needs. In this paper, we propose and validate an NB-IoT energy consumption model. The analytical model is based on a Markov chain. For the validation, an experimental setup is used to measure the energy consumption of two commercial NB-IoT user equipments (UEs) connected to a base station emulator. The evaluation is done considering three test cases. The comparison of the model and measurements is done in terms of the estimated battery lifetime and the latency needed to finish the control plane procedure. The conducted evaluation shows the analytical model performs well, obtaining a maximum relative error of the battery lifetime estimation between the model and the measurements of 21% for an assumed interarrival time (IAT) of 6 min.