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Comparing the Performance of NB-IoT, LTE Cat-M1, Sigfox, and LoRa for IoT End Devices Moving at High Speeds in the Air

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Abstract

Recently, NB-IoT, LTE Cat-M1, Sigfox, and LoRa have been proposed as promising Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) technologies for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. These technologies are aimed for IoT applications such as smart meters that can tolerate long transmission delays and only need a narrow band to periodically transmit a small amount of data. Although the performances of these technologies have been studied or compared in the literature, most comparisons were conducted in non-mobile conditions. In this work, we used a drone flying at 70 km/hr along a 10 km motorway to act as a mobile IoT end device to do the performance measurements. In this paper, we report and compare the performances of these technologies in such high-speed mobile conditions in the air.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the Center for Open Intelligent Connectivity from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan and the MOST project #109-2221-E-009-082.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Shie-Yuan Wang, Jui-En Chang, Hsin Fan & Yi-Hsiu Sun

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  1. Shie-Yuan Wang
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  2. Jui-En Chang
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  4. Yi-Hsiu Sun
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Correspondence to Shie-Yuan Wang.

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Wang, SY., Chang, JE., Fan, H. et al. Comparing the Performance of NB-IoT, LTE Cat-M1, Sigfox, and LoRa for IoT End Devices Moving at High Speeds in the Air. J Sign Process Syst 94, 81–99 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-021-01660-4

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