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Demystifying low-power wide-area communications for city IoT applications

Published: 03 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) communication technologies have the potential to provide a step change in the enablement of cost-effective and energy efficient Internet of Things (IoT) applications. With an increase in the number of offerings available the real performance of these emerging technologies remain unclear. That is, each technology comes with its own advantages and limitations; yet there is a lack of comparative studies that examine their trade-offs based on empirical evidence. This poses a major challenge to IoT solution architects and developers in selecting an appropriate technology for an envisioned IoT application in a given deployment context.
In this paper, we look beyond data sheets and white papers of LPWA communication technologies and provide insights into the performance of three emerging LPWA solutions based on real world experiments with different traffic loads and in different urban deployment contexts. Under the context of this study, specialized hardware was created to incorporate the different technologies and provide scientific quantitative and qualitative information related to data rates, success rates, transmission mode energy and power consumption, and communication ranges. The results of experimentation highlight the practicalities of placing LPWA technologies in real spaces and provide guidelines to IoT solution developers in terms of LPWA technology selection. Overall aim is to facilitate the design of new LPWA technologies and adaptive communication strategies that inform future IoT platforms.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WiNTECH '16: Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation, and Characterization
October 2016
107 pages
ISBN:9781450342520
DOI:10.1145/2980159
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 03 October 2016

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  • Research-article

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  • Intel Collaborative Research Institute on Sustainable Connected Cities
  • NEC Corporation, Japan

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MobiCom'16

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WiNTECH '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 10 of 15 submissions, 67%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 63 of 100 submissions, 63%

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  • (2023)Effective Short Packet Communication for Resource Allocation In Wireless Powered Iot Networks2023 9th International Conference on Advanced Computing and Communication Systems (ICACCS)10.1109/ICACCS57279.2023.10112719(2300-2304)Online publication date: 17-Mar-2023
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