'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Doi
Abstract
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
