Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Comparison between LoRa and NB-IoT coverage in urban and rural Southern Brazil regions

  • Published:
Annals of Telecommunications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In this work, we resort to computer simulations to compare the coverage of long range (LoRa) and narrowband (NB)-IoT in two different realistic scenarios of southern Brazil, encompassing an overall area of 8182.6 km2. The first scenario is predominantly rural with a few base stations (BSs) while the other scenario corresponds to a mostly urban area with high density of BSs. Our analysis, which adopts the actual position and parameters of the BSs of a given operator, also takes into account the digital elevation model (DEM) of the environments in order to calculate the path loss, following a realistic propagation model from 3GPP. Our results indicate that for a mainly rural environment, when operating at a similar sub-GHz frequency band, NB-IoT outperforms LoRa due to the directivity associate with directional antennas which provide a better coverage for devices which are far from BS but near the main beam. However, LoRa presents a better coverage, regardless of the site deployment, when the NB-IoT is considered to operate in the 1900-MHz band.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Note that, even though LoRa refers only to the Physical (PHY) Layer, the term NB-IoT encompasses a complete PHY, Multiple Access (MAC), and Network solution. However, since our aim is to compare coverage, which depends basically on PHY parameters, we opted for keeping the nomenclature LoRa instead of the more complete LoRaWAN, as in [13].

  2. Note that, since we do not have the data regarding the valid addresses in the considered regions, the results when applying such additional losses can be viewed as a worst case, where all the pixels in the grid are provided with a valid address.

  3. Note that the antenna gain varies with different pixels in NB-IoT, due to directionality. For NB-IoT, it must also be included the transmitter antenna gain, since output transmitted power is not considered Equivalent Isotropically Radiated Power (ERPI) [22].

References

  1. Raza U, Kulkarni P, Sooriyabandara M (2017) Low power wide area networks: an overview. IEEE Commun Surv Tutor 19(2):855–873. https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2017.2652320

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Sundmaeker H, Guillemin P, Friess P, Woelfflé S (2010) Vision and challenges for realizing the Internet of Things. Publications office of the European Union, cluster of European research projects on the Internet of Things

  3. Al-Fuqaha A, Guizani M, Mohammadi M, Aledhari M, Ayyash M (2015) Internet of Things: a survey on enabling technologies, protocols, and applications. IEEE Commun Surv Tutor 17(4):2347–2376. https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2015.2444095

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Mekki K, Bajic E, Chaxel F, Meyer F (2019) A comparative study of lpwan technologies for large-scale IoT deployment. ICT Express 5(1):1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icte.2017.12.005

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Popli S, Jha RK, Jain S (2019) A survey on energy efficient narrowband Internet of Things (NBIoT): architecture, application and challenges. IEEE Access 7:16739–16776. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2881533

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Ayoub W, Samhat AE, Nouvel F, Mroue M, Prévotet J (2018) Internet of mobile things: overview of lorawan, dash7, and nb-iot in lpwans standards and supported mobility. IEEE Commun Surv Tutor :1–1, https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2018.2877382

  7. Sinha RS, Wei Y, Hwang S H (2017) A survey on LPWA technology: LoRa and NB-IoT. ICT Express 3(1):14–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icte.2017.03.004

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Semtech What is LoRa?. https://www.semtech.com/lora/what-is-lora. Accessed 4 November 2019

  9. Adhikary A, Lin X, Wang YE (2016) Performance evaluation of NB-IoT coverage. In: 2016 IEEE 84th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC-Fall), pp 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1109/PIMRC.2016.7794567

  10. Mangalvedhe N, Ratasuk R, Ghosh A (2016) NB-IoT deployment study for low power wide area cellular IoT. In: 2016 IEEE 27th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), pp 1–6

  11. Grión FJ, Petracca GO, Lipuma DF, Amigó ER (2017) LoRa network coverage evaluation in urban and densely urban environment simulation and validation tests in autonomous city of Buenos Aires. In: 2017 XVII Workshop on Information Processing and Control (RPIC), pp 1–5

  12. Hoeller A, Souza RD, Alves H, Alcaraz López OL, Montejo-Sánchez S, Pellenz M E (2019) Optimum lorawan configuration under wi-sun interference. IEEE Access 7:170936–170948. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2955750

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Lauridsen M, Nguyen H, Vejlgaard B, Kovacs IZ, Mogensen P, Sorensen M (2017) Coverage comparison of gprs, nb-iot, lora, and sigfox in a 7800 km2 area. In: 2017 IEEE 85th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring), pp 1–5

  14. Sigfox Sigfox, the world’s leading IoT services provider. https://www.sigfox.com/en. Accessed 4 November 2019

  15. Vejlgaard B, Lauridsen M, Nguyen H, Kovacs IZ, Mogensen P, Sorensen M (2017) Coverage and capacity analysis of sigfox, lora, gprs, and nb-iot. In: 2017 IEEE 85th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring), pp 1–5

  16. Lauridsen M, Kovacs IZ, Mogensen P, Sorensen M, Holst S (2016) Coverage and capacity analysis of lte-m and nb-iot in a rural area. In: 2016 IEEE 84th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC-Fall), pp 1–5

  17. ANATEL Plano de Atribuição, Distribuição e Destinação de Radiofrequâncias. http://www.anatel.gov.br/setorregulado/atribuicao-destinacao-e-distribuicao-de-faixas. Accessed 22 November 2018

  18. 3GPP (2010) TR 36.814 V9.0.0; Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); Further advancements for E-UTRA physical layer aspects (Release 9). Tech. rep., 3GPP. 650 Route des Lucioles - Sophia Antipolis Valbonne - France

  19. Fraile R, Gozalvez J, Lazaro O, Monserrat JF, Cardona N (2004) Effect of a two dimensional shadowing model on system level performance evaluation. COST 273 TD (04), 190

  20. INPE Banco de Dados Geomorfométricos do Brasil. http://www.dsr.inpe.br/topodata/index.php. Accessed 20 March 2018

  21. Semtech (2017) SX1272/73 - 860 MHz to 1020 MHz Low Power Long Range Transceiver. Rev. 3.1

  22. 3GPP (2015) TR45.820 - Cellular System Support for Ultra Low Complexity and Low Thoughput Internet of Things. Tech. Rep., 650 Route des Lucioles - Sophia Antipolis Valbonne - France. V2.1.0

  23. ANATEL Relatório das Estações por localidade. https://www.anatel.gov.br/setorregulado/telefonia-movel-outorga/lista-de-estacoes. Accessed 2 April 2018

  24. Hoeller A, Souza RD, Montejo-Sánchez S, Alves H (2020) Performance analysis of single-cell adaptive data rate-enabled lorawan. IEEE Wirel Commun Lett :1–1, https://doi.org/10.1109/LWC.2020.2975604

  25. Hoeller A, Souza RD, Alcaraz López OL, Alves H, de Noronha Neto M, Brante G (2018) Analysis and performance optimization of lora networks with time and antenna diversity. IEEE Access 6:32820–32829. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2839064

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Orfanidis C, Feeney LM, Jacobsson M, Gunningberg P (2017) Investigating interference between lora and ieee 802.15.4g networks. In: 2017 IEEE 13th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob), pp 1–8

  27. About LoraWAN. https://lora-alliance.org. Accessed 30 November 2018

  28. Callebaut G, Leenders G, Buyle C, Crul S, der Perre LV (2019) LoRa physical layer evaluation for point-to-point links and coverage measurements in diverse environments. [Online]. arXiv:1909.08300

  29. 3GPP - Third Generation Partnership Project Standardization of NB-IoT Completed. http://www.3gpp.org/news-events/3gpp-news/1785-nb_iot_complete. Accessed 4 November 2019

  30. Zayas AD, Merino P (2017) The 3GPP NB-IoT system architecture for the internet of things. In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC’17), pp 277–282. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCW.2017.7962670

  31. Ratasuk R, Vejlgaard B, Mangalvedhe N, Ghosh A (2016) Nb-iot system for m2m communication. In: 2016 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference Workshops (WCNCW), pp 428–432

  32. Ahmad NA, Abdul Razak NI (2019) Performance of narrow-band internet of things (nb-iot) based on repetition of downlink physical channel. In: 2019 26th International Conference on Telecommunications (ICT), pp 506–509

  33. Wang YE, Lin X, Adhikary A, Grovlen A, Sui Y, Blankenship Y, Bergman J, Razaghi HS (2017) A primer on 3gpp narrowband internet of things. IEEE Commun Mag 55(3):117–123. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCOM.2017.1600510CM

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. ETSI (2017) TS 136 101 - User Equipment (UE) radio transmission and reception. V14.3.0

  35. Commscope (2013) Product specifications - cv65bsx-m. [Online]. https://www.commscope.com/product-type/antennas/base-station-antennas-equipment/base-station-antennas/itemcv65bsx-m

  36. Mwakwata CB, Malik H, Alam MM, Moullec YL, Parand S, Mumtaz S (2019) Narrowband internet of things (nb-iot): From physical (phy) and media access control (mac) layers perspectives. Sensors 19(11), https://doi.org/10.3390/s19112613

  37. Goldsmith A (2005) Wireless communications. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Book  Google Scholar 

  38. LoRa Alliance (2018) LoRaWAN 1.1 Regional Parameters. Revision: B

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CPGEI, Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, PR, Brazil

    Lucas Eduardo Ribeiro, Davi Wei Tokikawa, João Luiz Rebelatto & Glauber Brante

Authors
  1. Lucas Eduardo Ribeiro
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Davi Wei Tokikawa
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. João Luiz Rebelatto
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Glauber Brante
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lucas Eduardo Ribeiro.

Additional information

Publisher’s note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This work has been partially supported by CNPq and CAPES (Brazil).

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Ribeiro, L.E., Tokikawa, D.W., Rebelatto, J.L. et al. Comparison between LoRa and NB-IoT coverage in urban and rural Southern Brazil regions. Ann. Telecommun. 75, 755–766 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-020-00774-3

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-020-00774-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation