In the past decade, we have witnessed explosive growth in the number of
low-power embedded and Internet-connected devices, reinforcing the new
paradigm, Internet of Things (IoT). The low power wide area network (LPWAN),
due to its long-range, low-power and low-cost communication capability, is
actively considered by academia and industry as the future wireless
communication standard for IoT. However, despite the increasing popularity of
`mobile IoT', little is known about the suitability of LPWAN for those mobile
IoT applications in which nodes have varying degrees of mobility. To fill this
knowledge gap, in this paper, we conduct an experimental study to evaluate,
analyze, and characterize LPWAN in both indoor and outdoor mobile environments.
Our experimental results indicate that the performance of LPWAN is surprisingly
susceptible to mobility, even to minor human mobility, and the effect of
mobility significantly escalates as the distance to the gateway increases.
These results call for development of new mobility-aware LPWAN protocols to
support mobile IoT.Comment: To appear at 2017 IEEE 85th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC'17
Spring