Abstract
In this work, we resort to computer simulations to compare the coverage of long range (LoRa) and narrowband (NB)-IoT in two different realistic scenarios of southern Brazil, encompassing an overall area of 8182.6 km2. The first scenario is predominantly rural with a few base stations (BSs) while the other scenario corresponds to a mostly urban area with high density of BSs. Our analysis, which adopts the actual position and parameters of the BSs of a given operator, also takes into account the digital elevation model (DEM) of the environments in order to calculate the path loss, following a realistic propagation model from 3GPP. Our results indicate that for a mainly rural environment, when operating at a similar sub-GHz frequency band, NB-IoT outperforms LoRa due to the directivity associate with directional antennas which provide a better coverage for devices which are far from BS but near the main beam. However, LoRa presents a better coverage, regardless of the site deployment, when the NB-IoT is considered to operate in the 1900-MHz band.
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Notes
Note that, even though LoRa refers only to the Physical (PHY) Layer, the term NB-IoT encompasses a complete PHY, Multiple Access (MAC), and Network solution. However, since our aim is to compare coverage, which depends basically on PHY parameters, we opted for keeping the nomenclature LoRa instead of the more complete LoRaWAN, as in [13].
Note that, since we do not have the data regarding the valid addresses in the considered regions, the results when applying such additional losses can be viewed as a worst case, where all the pixels in the grid are provided with a valid address.
Note that the antenna gain varies with different pixels in NB-IoT, due to directionality. For NB-IoT, it must also be included the transmitter antenna gain, since output transmitted power is not considered Equivalent Isotropically Radiated Power (ERPI) [22].
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This work has been partially supported by CNPq and CAPES (Brazil).
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Ribeiro, L.E., Tokikawa, D.W., Rebelatto, J.L. et al. Comparison between LoRa and NB-IoT coverage in urban and rural Southern Brazil regions. Ann. Telecommun. 75, 755–766 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-020-00774-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-020-00774-3