Power Consumption and Coverage Test of NB-IoT in the Substation Edge Computing Environment

Abstract

With the continuous development of smart grids, the application of Internet of Things technology in the substation edge computing environment is becoming more and more widespread. Traditional communication technologies, such as ZigBee and 4G, have limited transmission distances with low reliability, or high power consumption with inconvenient deployment. Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new cellular technology introduced in 3GPP with wide coverage, large capacity, low power consumption and low cost. It provides a new kind of IoT communication technique in substation, which has complex electromagnetic interference that can cause interference to wireless transmission. In this paper, the power consumption and coverage performance of NB-IoT devices in substation environment are tested by our testbed-based experimental study. We leverage results from our experiments in providing an analysis on the power consumption and the impact of coverage when there are complex electromagnetic interferences