A Comparative Survey Study on LPWA Networks: LoRa and NB-IoT

According to recent studies, billions of objects are expected to be connected wirelessly by 2020. The Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks are already playing an important role in connecting billions of new devices making up the IoT. Long Range (LoRa) and Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) are currently the two leading technologies triggering considerable research interest. This paper focuses on providing a comprehensive and comparative survey study on the current research and industrial states of NB-IoT and LoRa in terms of their power efficiency, their capacity, quality of service (QoS), reliability and range of coverage. The outcome of this research survey demonstrates that the unlicensed LoRa is more advantageous than the NB-IoT in terms of its energy efficiency, its capacity and cost while the NB-IoT gives benefits in terms of its reliability, resilience to interference, latency and QoS. It is further shown that despite the considerable research and development that has so far been carried out on existing LPWA technologies, there are still challenges to be addressed. This paper therefore proposes potential research future directions to address the identified challenges.

@article{Migabo2018,
  title     = {A Comparative Survey Study on LPWA Networks: LoRa and NB-IoT},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {9},
  number    = {1},
  year      = {2018},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Munguakonkwa Emmanuel Migabo and Karim Djouani and Anish Kurien and Thomas Olwal},
  doi       = {10.14569/SpecialIssue.2018.0901149},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/SpecialIssue.2018.0901149}
}