On the performance of IoT LPWAN technologies: the case of Sigfox, LoRaWAN and NB-IoT

Internet of Things is a widespread technology that comprises several networking solutions for connecting things to the rest of the Internet. Understanding the characteristics of such solutions is fundamental in order to satisfy the diverse requirements of all the possible applications. The goal of this paper is to empirically evaluate and compare the performance of the most spread technologies for IoT low-power long-range communications. The parameters considered are the energy efficiency, the message losses, and the latency of a message. Obtained results show that up to 2% of messages can be lost when using LoRaWAN, but the latency is always smaller than 7 seconds. NB-IoT shows slightly larger latency values and more delivered messages than LoRaWAN. The messages sent using Sigfox are always correctly delivered, but the communication introduces delays up to 100 seconds. These results are of great importance for all the players in the IoT scenario interested in LPWAN technologies. The results of this study show how different communication technologies provide significantly different performance.