NB-IoT Versus LoRaWAN: An Experimental Evaluation for Industrial Applications

Low power and long-range communications are crucial features of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm that is becoming essential even for industrial applications. Today, the most promising long-range communication technologies are LoRaWAN and Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT), which are driving a large IoT ecosystem. In this article, we evaluate the performance of LoRaWAN and NB-IoT with accurate in-field measurements using the same application context for a fair comparison in terms of energy efficiency, lifetime, quality of service, and coverage. The NB-IoT energy transmission is scarcely dependent on the payload length. Thus applications that can tolerate buffering and caching techniques on the node are favored. On the other hand, LoRaWAN consumes 10 x lower energy compared to NB-IoT for occasional and latency-sensitive communications, for which it enables much end-device lifetime. Finally, this paper provides design guidelines for future industrial applications with stringent requirements of long-range and low power wireless connectivity.