Narrow-Band Wireless Wide-Area Network Technologies; Overview and Performance Evaluation for 5G use cases

Wireless networking technologies are one of the major building blocks of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0 applications. To meet the wireless connectivity requirements such as long-range, low-cost, low-bandwidth, scalability, and low-energy (for battery powered or energy-autarkic operation), new classes of Narrow-Band Wireless Wide-Area Network (NBWWAN) technologies are introduced. NBWWAN promises a new level of link budgets at low output power and cost allowing a long range and stable local communication in IoT deployments [1]. In general, NBWWANs may operate in unlicensed and licensed bands. The networks operate in unlicensed bands and proprietary solutions are already available in the market such as LoRa/ LoRaWAN, SigFox, MIOTY, Weightless, Ingenu etc. Alternative for the LPWANs in licensed band are cellular network variants, being standardized by 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) under the umbrella term of cellular IoT (cIoT). The most suitable cIoT technology for LPWAN use case is Narrow-Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT). The LPWAN and cIoT technologies are collectively referred as NBWWAN since it operates on narrow bandwidth and mainly target to achieve wide-area coverage. Since these networks typically operate in a spatially distributed environment and their characteristics and functions coupled with wireless channels, it is a tedious process to systematically compare, test, and measure the performance of these wireless systems. For performance evaluation, construction of systematic test environment is an important task. This tutorial presentation focusses on in-depth theoretical concepts and sharing our experience with performance evaluation of NBWWANs.