Connectivity Technology Selection and Deployment Strategies for IoT Service Provision Over LPWAN

The plethora of available IoT connectivity technologies makes selection of the most suitable and affordable offering challenging for IoT service providers. This is a typical problem when considering deployments over Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN). Each technology has different implications as to how edge, fog, and cloud resources can be utilized to provide an end-to-end service. The connectivity decision directly affects the initial investment, operating expenditure, level of control desired over the underlying infrastructure, and the resulting managerial overhead. This article provides a generic cost model and framework to assist IoT service providers towards cost-aware LPWAN technology selection and dimensioning decisions. Our framework captures key cost factors and considers both network and compute infrastructure elements. Considering a monitoring IoT application as a reference, we analyze various deployment strategies enabled by two major IoT connectivity technologies, namely LoRaWAN and NB-IoT, quantifying their associated costs and distilling general deployment guidelines.