Real-World Evaluation of Power Consumption and Performance of NB-IoT in Malaysia

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is expected to lead the way in wireless access technologies and support major 5G-based Internet of Things applications in the future. Since NB-IoT has yet to be fully deployed globally, there are only limited real-world performance evaluations available, particularly in the case of outdoor performance. Therefore, this study expanded on previous studies and comprehensively evaluated the performance of NB-IoT in the real world in terms of coverage parameters, path loss (PL), packet delivery rate (PDR), and latency limits. Numerical and detailed analyses were also performed to calculate power consumption and estimate the average battery life of NB-IoT, Sigfox, and LoRaWAN in relation to the various factors affecting power consumption. These three technologies were then compared in terms of power consumption. An overall PDR of 91.76% was achieved, indicating that NB-IoT can handle high data rates with minimal signal quality. NB-IoT performance was also found to correspond with theoretical assumptions on coverage and maximum range. However, depending on signal quality, latency was found to vary greatly, resulting in critical degradation of battery life efficiency. Although this study discovered that immense power savings could be achieved by applying critical power management strategies, achieving a long battery life for NB-IoT was not simple. LoRaWAN and Sigfox technologies proved to be more battery efficient than NB-IoT. In a one packet delivery per day scenario, LoRaWAN, Sigfox, and NB-IoT were found to have average battery lives of 1608.9, 1527.6, and 344.9 days, respectively.