Coverage and Energy-Efficiency Experimental Test Performance for a Comparative Evaluation of Unlicensed LPWAN: LoRaWAN and SigFox

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) have emerged as an attractive Internet of Things (IoT) communication option. When deploying a communication network to support IoT applications, large coverage and low power consumption are critical requirements. Despite the fact that existing LPWAN technology solutions promote IoT requirements such as long communication range, energy efficiency, scalability, and low cost, network performance is a major concern. With so many LPWAN technologies available, there is a growing interest in evaluating them. Recent works have presented various comparison studies of LPWAN technologies, but the majority of them have approached the analysis from the standpoint of comparing technical specifications rather than presenting measurement results obtained from network deployment scenarios. We argue that by proposing a comparative evaluation from an experimental standpoint, the comparison discussion is deepened. This paper proposes an experimental comparative evaluation of LoRaWAN and SigFox, two emerging LPWAN technologies operating in sub-GHz Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) frequency bands, based on coverage and energy-efficiency test performance. The experimental evaluation was proposed first by identifying coverage and energy-efficiency as the two most important design goals for LPWAN applications. Second, by proposing test performance to evaluate those goals, where extensive measurements were made in network deployments, and finally, by highlighting the main performance findings in both networks for comparison purposes. The results show that in a fair-weather test, LoRaWAN outperformed SigFox in terms of coverage, achieving a higher packet delivery rate (PDR greater than or similar to 80%), and having higher radio strength signal (RSSI greater than or similar to -110 dBm). Sigfox, on the other hand, shows better energy efficiency with 20% more sent messages under the same test conditions.