Performance Evaluation of Wi-Fi HaLow, NB-IoT and LoRa for Smart City Applications

Abstract

Long-range wireless technologies are at the core of Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city applications. While they offer many advantages in terms of ease of deployment, flexibility, mobility, and ubiquity, to name but a few, they are not equally suitable for smart city applications. Since 'one size fits all' does not hold in this context, finding out which long-range wireless technology is the best requires a thorough performance evaluation of these technologies in specific context and scenarios. In this paper, we focus on performance evaluation of three prominent long-range wireless communications, namely LoRa and Wi-Fi HaLow in the ISM band and NB-IoT in the licensed band, to better understand their benefits and limitations in the context of four smart city application scenarios. These scenarios cover both under and above ground applications in areas with different propagation properties.