Coverage and Capacity Analysis of Sigfox - Lora - Nbiot
Coverage and Capacity Analysis of Sigfox - Lora - Nbiot
I. I NTRODUCTION
According to Cisco the Internet of Things (IoT) may result
in a combined increased revenue and lower costs of more than
14 trillion USD from 2013 to 2022 [1]. Therefore, numerous Fig. 1. Site deployment in Telenors sub GHz network covering 8000 km2.
network technologies have been developed to provide wireless
connectivity for the sensors and actuators that constitute the work comparing the performance of LoRa, Sigfox, NB-IoT
IoT. The technologies focus on providing scalability, extended and GPRS. In recent work [11] we compared the coverage of
coverage, low cost, and energy efficiency for the end user the four technologies in a 8000 km2 area, and in this paper
devices, which currently amount to 6-10 billion units [1], [2]. our contribution is to build on the coverage results to model
Some IoT devices will connect using local area networks and analyze the probability of collisions and blocking, which
such as WiFi and Bluetooth, but the market for wide area corresponds to the overall system capacity.
coverage is significant. Currently GSM, and its improvements The paper is based on simulated link loss between both
GPRS and EDGE, is the main connectivity provider for wide urban and rural users and site locations, which are based on
area IoT [2]. However, operators are looking to replace the Telenor’s sub 1 GHz cellular network grid in North Jutland,
technology, which was standardized in the early 1990s [3], Denmark illustrated in Fig. 1. The link loss is compared with
with 3G and LTE. Both GSM and LTE have been updated the link budget of each technology after which the achievable
in recent 3GPP standardization releases to improve the afo- data rate and time on air is calculated. Using a simple traffic
rementioned IoT-related key performance indicators (KPIs). model the probability of uplink random access collisions and
The updates are Extended Coverage GSM, for GSM, and download blocking is then estimated.
Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) for LTE, [2], [4]. The NB-IoT can The paper is structured as follows; Section II provides an
be deployed in refarmed GSM carriers, but also in the guard overview of the four technologies followed by the system
band or in a single subcarrier of existing LTE deployments. level modeling in section III. Next the results are presented
In addition to the cellular technologies there are also a num- in section IV and finally the conclusion is given in section V.
ber of Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWA) network technologies,
II. T ECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW
which operate in the license free industrial, scientific, and
medial (ISM) band. Long Range (LoRa) WAN [5] and SigFox In this section the four LPWA technologies are compared
[6] are probably the two most common IoT connectivity to facilitate the analysis of their performance in the following
technologies, which benefit from access to this free spectrum. section. Table I summarizes the KPIs per technology.
The LPWA technologies are rather new, and while there are As mentioned LoRa and Sigfox are deployed in license free
studies of their individual performance such as on LoRa [7], ISM bands and this work targets a deployment in the European
[8], on Sigfox [9], and on NB-IoT and its companion eMTC 868 MHz ISM band [12]. The band regulations specify two
[10], to the best of the authors knowledge there is no academic mechanisms for sharing the spectrum; duty cycle or listen
← 24 % 0.8
Cumulative Distribution Funciton [-]
← 16 %
0.7
10-1 ← 11 % ← 11 %
0.6
CDF
0.5 SigFox - outdoor
← 2.8 %
SigFox - indoor
0.4 LoRa, ACK - outdoor
LoRa, ACK - indoor
-2
10 Cellular - Outdoor users LoRa, UNACK - outdoor
← 0.8 % 0.3
Cellular - Indoor users, penetration loss 10 dB LoRa, UNACK - indoor
Cellular - Indoor users, penetration loss 20 dB
Cellular - Indoor users, penetration loss 30 dB 0.2 NB-IoT - outdoor
LPWA - Outdoor users NB-IoT - indoor
← 0.27 %
← 0.23 % LPWA - Indoor users, penetration loss 10 dB GPRS - outdoor
LPWA - Indoor users, penetration loss 20 dB
0.1
GPRS - indoor
LPWA - Indoor users, penetration loss 30 dB
10-3 0
-180 -170 -160 -150 -140 -130 -120 0 0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06 0.07 0.08 0.09 0.1
Minimum Link Loss [dB] UL collision propability
Fig. 4. Maximum coupling loss CDF for all locations in the analyzed area. Fig. 5. CDF of the uplink collision probability due to random access failure.
a view on the individual areas refer to [11]. 1
For indoor users experiencing 20 dB additional penetration 0.9
SigFox - outdoor
SigFox - indoor
loss the GPRS coverage is reduced to 60 %, while LoRa has LoRa, ACK - outdoor
97 %, and SigFox and NB-IoT more than 99 % coverage. In 95%tile UL failure propability 0.8 LoRa, ACK - indoor
the deep indoor case, with 30 dB additional penetration loss, LoRa, UNACK - outdoor
0.7 LoRa, UNACK - indoor
GPRS only covers about 30 % of the users while Lora covers NB-IoT - outdoor
76 %. SigFox and NB-IoT covers around 85 % and 90 % of 0.6 NB-IoT - indoor
GPRS - outdoor
the users, respectively. 0.5 GPRS - indoor
Fig. 4 illustrates that there is a few dB difference between
NB-IoT/GPRS and SigFox/LoRa in the link loss estimates. 0.4
0.2
LoRa blocking - outdoor
0.2
since all devices will utilize the most robust communication
LoRa blocking - indoor
settings the uplink collision probability is significant. When
95%tile blocking propability