A Study for Remote Monitoring of Water Points in Mauritania Based on IoT (LoRa) Technology

Wetlands in Mauritania contain the most important water sources necessary for the survival of rural communities in the country. In these areas, the main rural activities such as animal husbandry, agriculture, and fishing take place. Lack of water or flooding must be monitored to plan solutions in advance. After a comparative study of IoT wireless technologies, we proposed that LoRa technology is the most suitable for our field of application. However, in certain areas where access to the cellular network is difficult, we propose the addition of satellite communication in the LoRamonitoring system to achieve information collected at any point in the world via the cloud and the Internet. We carried out a practical case for the areas covered by the UMTS (3G) cellular network using devices integrating LoRaWAN to evaluate the performance of this technology. The results show the success of the communication over a distance of 14 km

Suitability of LoRa, Sigfox and NB-IoT for Different Internet-of-Things Applications

The large-scale implementation of the internet of things (IoT) technologies is becoming a reality. IoT technologies benefit from low-power wide area network (LPWAN) systems. These technologies include Long Range (LoRa), Sigfox, and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). Numerous networks have already been deployed around the world, which is expected to accelerate the growth of IoT. This thesis discusses the performance of these three prominent LPWAN technologies in the market that have been specifically designed for IoT use. The main idea of LPWAN technologies is to provide wide coverage area using only small amount of base stations and to serve large amount of low-power and low-cost IoT devices. The main purpose of this thesis work is to compare LoRa, Sigfox, and NB-IoT and evaluate their suitability to various IoT applications. The appropriate technology selection is possible through in-depth analysis and technological comparison of LPWAN systems. There are many technological differences among these LPWAN technologies. A single technology may not be able to meet all requirements of all IoT applications. Therefore, some IoT applications can benefit from one technology more than others. The right selection helps in fulfilling the need of IoT application to save cost, time and improve efficiency. In addition to the literature-based suitability evaluation of the aforementioned technologies some practical measurements are performed using commercial off-the-shelf hardware. These measurements consider LoRa and Sigfox user devices in both outdoor and indoor locations. The key performance indicators obtained from the measurements are signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and received signal strength indicator (RSSI). In addition, also penetration loss from outdoor to indoor is derived. The obtained measurement results were in line with the ones found from the literature

A comparative study of loRaWAN, sigFox, and NB-IoT for smart water grid

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) are becoming the powerful communication technologies of the IoT of tomorrow. LoRaWAN, SigFox, and NB-IoT are the three competing LPWAN technologies. On the other hand, Smart Water Grid (SWG) is an emerging paradigm that promises to overcome issues such as pipes leaks encountered by current water infrastructure by deploying smart devices into the water infrastructure for monitoring purposes. This paper firstly explores the physical and communication features of the above LPWAN technologies and provides a comprehensive comparison between them as well as their suitability for the Smart Water Grid (SWG) use case. The important aspect of SWG is to connect devices such as smart water meters and other tiny devices like sensors installed into the water pipelines for the system monitoring purpose. We consider Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) also called Smart Water Metering when dealing with the water grid, which is the main application of SWG and we study the scalability of LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, and SigFox in such application. Under NS3, the simulation results show that NB-IoT provides the best scalability compared to LoRaWAN and SigFox and thus is able to support a huge number of devices with a low packet error rate.publishe

Low-Power Wide Area Network Technologies for Internet-of-Things: A Comparative Review

The rapid growth of Internet-of-Things (IoT) in the current decade has led to the the development of a multitude of new access technologies targeted at low-power, wide area networks (LP-WANs). However, this has also created another challenge pertaining to technology selection. This paper reviews the performance of LP-WAN technologies for IoT, including design choices and their implications. We consider Sigfox, LoRaWAN, WavIoT, random phase multiple access (RPMA), narrow band IoT (NB-IoT) as well as LTE-M and assess their performance in terms of signal propagation, coverage and energy conservation. The comparative analyses presented in this paper are based on available data sheets and simulation results. A sensitivity analysis is also conducted to evaluate network performance in response to variations in system design parameters. Results show that each of RPMA, NB-IoT and LTE-M incurs at least 9 dB additional path loss relative to Sigfox and LoRaWAN. This study further reveals that with a 10% improvement in receiver sensitivity, NB-IoT 882 MHz and LoRaWAN can increase coverage by up to 398% and 142% respectively, without adverse effects on the energy requirements. Finally, extreme weather conditions can significantly reduce the active network life of LP-WANs. In particular, the results indicate that operating an IoT device in a temperature of -20∘C can shorten its life by about half; 53% (WavIoT, LoRaWAN, Sigfox, NB-IoT, RPMA) and 48% in LTE-M compared with environmental temperature of 40C

Low-power wide-area networks : design goals, architecture, suitability to use cases and research challenges

Previous survey articles on Low-Powered Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs) lack a systematic analysis of the design goals of LPWAN and the design decisions adopted by various commercially available and emerging LPWAN technologies, and no study has analysed how their design decisions impact their ability to meet design goals. Assessing a technology's ability to meet design goals is essential in determining suitable technologies for a given application. To address these gaps, we have analysed six prominent design goals and identified the design decisions used to meet each goal in the eight LPWAN technologies, ranging from technical consideration to business model, and determined which specific technique in a design decision will help meet each goal to the greatest extent. System architecture and specifications are presented for those LPWAN solutions, and their ability to meet each design goal is evaluated. We outline seventeen use cases across twelve domains that require large low power network infrastructure and prioritise each design goal's importance to those applications as Low, Moderate, or High. Using these priorities and each technology's suitability for meeting design goals, we suggest appropriate LPWAN technologies for each use case. Finally, a number of research challenges are presented for current and future technologies. © 2013 IEEE