Energy efficiency in short and wide-area IoT technologies—A survey

In the last years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a key application context in the design and evolution of technologies in the transition toward a 5G ecosystem. More and more IoT technologies have entered the market and represent important enablers in the deployment of networks of interconnected devices. As network and spatial device densities grow, energy efficiency and consumption are becoming an important aspect in analyzing the performance and suitability of different technologies. In this framework, this survey presents an extensive review of IoT technologies, including both Low-Power Short-Area Networks (LPSANs) and Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs), from the perspective of energy efficiency and power consumption. Existing consumption models and energy efficiency mechanisms are categorized, analyzed and discussed, in order to highlight the main trends proposed in literature and standards toward achieving energy-efficient IoT networks. Current limitations and open challenges are also discussed, aiming at highlighting new possible research directions

Analytical Modeling and Experimental Validation of NB-IoT Device Energy Consumption

The recent standardization of 3GPP Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) paves the way to support low-power wide-area (LPWA) use cases in cellular networks. NB-IoT design goals are extended coverage, low power and low cost devices, and massive connections. As a new radio access technology, it is necessary to analyze the possibilities NB-IoT provides to support different traffic and coverage needs. In this paper, we propose and validate an NB-IoT energy consumption model. The analytical model is based on a Markov chain. For the validation, an experimental setup is used to measure the energy consumption of two commercial NB-IoT user equipments (UEs) connected to a base station emulator. The evaluation is done considering three test cases. The comparison of the model and measurements is done in terms of the estimated battery lifetime and the latency needed to finish the control plane procedure. The conducted evaluation shows the analytical model performs well, obtaining a maximum relative error of the battery lifetime estimation between the model and the measurements of 21% for an assumed interarrival time (IAT) of 6 min.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund under Project TEC2016-76795-C6-4-R and in part by the H2020 European Project TRIANGLE under Grant 688712

Survey on wireless technology trade-offs for the industrial internet of things

Aside from vast deployment cost reduction, Industrial Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (IWSAN) introduce a new level of industrial connectivity. Wireless connection of sensors and actuators in industrial environments not only enables wireless monitoring and actuation, it also enables coordination of production stages, connecting mobile robots and autonomous transport vehicles, as well as localization and tracking of assets. All these opportunities already inspired the development of many wireless technologies in an effort to fully enable Industry 4.0. However, different technologies significantly differ in performance and capabilities, none being capable of supporting all industrial use cases. When designing a network solution, one must be aware of the capabilities and the trade-offs that prospective technologies have. This paper evaluates the technologies potentially suitable for IWSAN solutions covering an entire industrial site with limited infrastructure cost and discusses their trade-offs in an effort to provide information for choosing the most suitable technology for the use case of interest. The comparative discussion presented in this paper aims to enable engineers to choose the most suitable wireless technology for their specific IWSAN deployment

Cellular, Wide-Area, and Non-Terrestrial IoT: A Survey on 5G Advances and the Road Towards 6G

The next wave of wireless technologies is proliferating in connecting things among themselves as well as to humans. In the era of the Internet of things (IoT), billions of sensors, machines, vehicles, drones, and robots will be connected, making the world around us smarter. The IoT will encompass devices that must wirelessly communicate a diverse set of data gathered from the environment for myriad new applications. The ultimate goal is to extract insights from this data and develop solutions that improve quality of life and generate new revenue. Providing large-scale, long-lasting, reliable, and near real-time connectivity is the major challenge in enabling a smart connected world. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on existing and emerging communication solutions for serving IoT applications in the context of cellular, wide-area, as well as non-terrestrial networks. Specifically, wireless technology enhancements for providing IoT access in fifth-generation (5G) and beyond cellular networks, and communication networks over the unlicensed spectrum are presented. Aligned with the main key performance indicators of 5G and beyond 5G networks, we investigate solutions and standards that enable energy efficiency, reliability, low latency, and scalability (connection density) of current and future IoT networks. The solutions include grant-free access and channel coding for short-packet communications, non-orthogonal multiple access, and on-device intelligence. Further, a vision of new paradigm shifts in communication networks in the 2030s is provided, and the integration of the associated new technologies like artificial intelligence, non-terrestrial networks, and new spectra is elaborated. Finally, future research directions toward beyond 5G IoT networks are pointed out.Comment: Submitted for review to IEEE CS&

Performance Analysis of IoTWireless Cellular Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming a reality and with it comes the need to support more devices with better coverage and low power consumption on the wireless network. One of the Low-Power Wide Wan (LPWA) technologies that aims to meet these requirements is Narrow-Band IoT (NB-IoT). NB-IoT is a 4G cellular technology particularly focused on IoT scenarios demanding for low throughput and very low energy consumption. This dissertation investigates the capacity and performance of NB-IoT technology in real-world scenarios by comparing the results of measurements performed under different radio conditions around Lisbon’s metropolitan area. Inspired by related works presented in the dissertation, the approaches adopted in this work are explained and the metrics collected are described in detail. Through practical measurements campaigns we characterize different metrics of NB-IoT performance for different propagation scenarios, identifying hypothetical causes for the observed performance.A Internet das Coisas (IoT) está a tornar-se uma realidade e com ela surge uma necessidade de albergar mais dispositivos com melhor cobertura e menor consumo de energia nas redes sem fios. Uma das tecnologias Low-Power Wide Area (LPWA) que visa atender a esses requisitos é Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT). NB-IoT é uma tecnologia celular 4G particularmente focada em cenários de IoT que exigem baixo débito e baixo consumo de energia. Esta dissertação investiga a capacidade e o desempenho da tecnologia NB-IoT em cenários do mundo real, comparando os resultados das medições realizadas sob diferentes condições de rádio na área metropolitana de Lisboa. Tomando como inspiração alguns trabalhos relacionados apresentados na dissertação, as abordagens adotadas neste trabalho são devidamente explicadas e as métricas descritas em detalhes. Através de medições práticas, são caracterizadas diferentes métricas de desempenho de NB-IoT para diferentes cenários de propagação, identificando causas hipotéticas para o desempenho observado

Internet of Things and Sensors Networks in 5G Wireless Communications

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Internet of Things and Sensors Networks in 5G Wireless Communications that was published in Sensors

Internet of Things and Sensors Networks in 5G Wireless Communications

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Internet of Things and Sensors Networks in 5G Wireless Communications that was published in Sensors

Internet of Things and Sensors Networks in 5G Wireless Communications

The Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted much attention from society, industry and academia as a promising technology that can enhance day to day activities, and the creation of new business models, products and services, and serve as a broad source of research topics and ideas. A future digital society is envisioned, composed of numerous wireless connected sensors and devices. Driven by huge demand, the massive IoT (mIoT) or massive machine type communication (mMTC) has been identified as one of the three main communication scenarios for 5G. In addition to connectivity, computing and storage and data management are also long-standing issues for low-cost devices and sensors. The book is a collection of outstanding technical research and industrial papers covering new research results, with a wide range of features within the 5G-and-beyond framework. It provides a range of discussions of the major research challenges and achievements within this topic

Towards efficient support for massive Internet of Things over cellular networks

The usage of Internet of Things (IoT) devices over cellular networks is seeing tremendous growth in recent years, and that growth in only expected to increase in the near future. While existing 4G and 5G cellular networks offer several desirable features for this type of applications, their design has historically focused on accommodating traditional mobile devices (e.g. smartphones). As IoT devices have very different characteristics and use cases, they create a range of problems to current networks which often struggle to accommodate them at scale. Although newer cellular network technologies, such as Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT), were designed to focus on the IoT characteristics, they were extensively based on 4G and 5G networks to preserve interoperability, and decrease their deployment cost. As such, several inefficiencies of 4G/5G were also carried over to the newer technologies. This thesis focuses on identifying the core issues that hinder the large scale deployment of IoT over cellular networks, and proposes novel protocols to largely alleviate them. We find that the most significant challenges arise mainly in three distinct areas: connection establishment, network resource utilisation and device energy efficiency. Specifically, we make the following contributions. First, we focus on the connection establishment process and argue that the current procedures, when used by IoT devices, result in increased numbers of collisions, network outages and a signalling overhead that is disproportionate to the size of the data transmitted, and the connection duration of IoT devices. Therefore, we propose two mechanisms to alleviate these inefficiencies. Our first mechanism, named ASPIS, focuses on both the number of collisions and the signalling overhead simultaneously, and provides enhancements to increase the number of successful IoT connections, without disrupting existing background traffic. Our second mechanism focuses specifically on the collisions at the connection establishment process, and used a novel approach with Reinforcement Learning, to decrease their number and allow a larger number of IoT devices to access the network with fewer attempts. Second, we propose a new multicasting mechanism to reduce network resource utilisation in NB-IoT networks, by delivering common content (e.g. firmware updates) to multiple similar devices simultaneously. Notably, our mechanism is both more efficient during multicast data transmission, but also frees up resources that would otherwise be perpetually reserved for multicast signalling under the existing scheme. Finally, we focus on energy efficiency and propose novel protocols that are designed for the unique usage characteristics of NB-IoT devices, in order to reduce the device power consumption. Towards this end, we perform a detailed energy consumption analysis, which we use as a basis to develop an energy consumption model for realistic energy consumption assessment. We then take the insights from our analysis, and propose optimisations to significantly reduce the energy consumption of IoT devices, and assess their performance