Coverage and Capacity Analysis of Sigfox, LoRa, GPRS, and NB-IoT

In this paper the coverage and capacity of SigFox, LoRa, GPRS, and NB-IoT is compared using a real site deployment covering 8000 km2 in Northern Denmark. Using the existing Telenor cellular site grid it is shown that the four technologies have more than 99 % outdoor coverage, while GPRS is challenged for indoor coverage. Furthermore, the study analyzes the capacity of the four technologies assuming a traffic growth from 1 to 10 IoT device per user. The conclusion is that the 95 %-tile uplink failure rate for outdoor users is below 5 % for all technologies. For indoor users only NB-IoT provides uplink and downlink connectivity with less than 5 % failure rate, while SigFox is able to provide an unacknowledged uplink data service with about 12 % failure rate. Both GPRS and LoRa struggle to provide sufficient indoor coverage and capacity.

I. Introduction

According to Cisco the Internet of Things (IoT) may result in a combined increased revenue and lower costs of more than 14 trillion USD from 2013 to 2022 [1]. Therefore, numerous network technologies have been developed to provide wireless connectivity for the sensors and actuators that constitute the IoT. The technologies focus on providing scalability, extended coverage, low cost, and energy efficiency for the end user devices, which currently amount to 6–10 billion units [1], [2].