In-depth Real-World Evaluation of NB-IoT Module Energy Consumption

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed real-world analysis of NB-IoT module energy consumption, highlighting how device and network configurations impact battery life in low-power IoT deployments.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive high-resolution energy consumption dataset for NB-IoT modules and analyzes the effects of various configurations on energy efficiency.

Findings

Energy consumption varies significantly across transfer phases.

Device and network settings critically influence power usage.

Preliminary results guide future energy optimization strategies.

Abstract

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a recent addition to the 3GPP standards offering low power wide area networking (LP-WAN) for a massive amount of IoT devices communicating at low data rates in the licensed bands. As the number of deployed NB-IoT devices worldwide increases, the question of energy-efficient real-world NB-IoT device and network operation that would maximize the device battery lifetime becomes crucial for NB-IoT service popularity and adoption. In this paper, we present a detailed energy consumption of an NB-IoT module obtained from a custom-designed NB-IoT platform from which a large amount of high time-resolution data is collected. We perform a detailed energy consumption analysis of each NB-IoT data transfer phase and discuss both the device and the network-side configurations that may affect the module energy consumption in each of the phases. Preliminary results and conclusions are put forth along with the discussion of ongoing and future study plans.