Title: A tractable stochastic geometry model of coverage and an approach to energy efficiency estimation in LPWAN networks

Authors: Qiaoshou Liu; Edward Andrew Ball

Addresses: School of Communication and Information Engineering, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, 400065, Chongqing, China ' Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, The University of Sheffield, S10 2TN, Sheffield, UK

Abstract: In this paper, we consider two types of low-power wide area network (LPWAN): LoRa wide area network (LoRaWAN) and narrow-band internet of things (NBIoT) network. We first propose a framework to calculate the average number of retransmissions in LoRaWAN networks and NBIoT networks based on stochastic geometry. Combining the average number of retransmissions, we give an approximate method to calculate both networks' energy efficiency and estimate the battery lifetime in LoRaWAN networks and NBIoT networks. The numerical results show that the battery lifetime is mainly influenced by the number of active UEs and the spreading factor in LoRaWAN networks and sleeping mode in NBIoT networks, when the data size transmitted each day is fixed. In NBIoT networks, the UEs can work for much longer with power saving mode (PSM) than with extended idle-mode discontinuous reception cycle (eDRX), even exceeding LoRaWAN networks in some cases.

Keywords: LPWAN; low-power wide area network; LoRaWAN; LoRa wide area network; NBIoT; narrow-band internet of things; stochastic geometry; PSM; power saving mode; eDRX.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2020.109188

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2020 Vol.33 No.4, pp.211 - 223

Received: 02 Aug 2019
Accepted: 18 Jan 2020
Published online: 01 Sep 2020 *

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