Exploring the Performance Boundaries of NB-IoT
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NB-IoT has just jonied the LPWAN community. Unlike most of its competitors, NB-IoT was not really born from a clean sheet. Indeed, it is tightly connected with LTE, from which it inherits many of its features that undoubtedly conditions its behavior. In this paper, we empirically explore the boundaries of this technology, analyzing critical characteristics, from a user's point of view, such as energy consumption, reliability and delays. The results show that its performance in terms of energy is comparable, even outperforming on average a LPWAN reference technology such as LoRa, with the added benefit of guaranteed delivery. However, the high variability observed in both energy expenditure and network delays call into question its suitability for some applications, especially those subject to service-level agreements.
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