Wireless Communications for IoT: Energy Efficiency Survey

Internet of Things concept has brought us many sensors application possibilities that aim to make our lives better. The IoT concept entail the use of low-power, low-cost, long-range sensors that can collect data from the environment and send it to the user application using wireless link, for maximum mobility. In this paper we evaluate and compare a couple of the market available LPWAN solutions, trough the energy efficiency perspective. Although LPWAN implies low-power devices, some of the modules used in the experimental setup need a high current burst, making them inefficient if the power supply is not properly sized. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is the energy efficiency analysis of the main existing IoT technologies like LoRa or SigFox. From the obtained results one may conclude that some modules can transmit using high current peaks for short period of time while others can transmit low current peaks for long period of time, being useful only for specific monitoring applications.