An Empirical Modelling for the Baseline Energy Consumption of an NB-IoT
Radio Transceiver
Abstract
NarrowBand Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is an emerging cellular IoT
technology that offers attractive features for deploying low-power wide
area networks suitable for implementing massive machine type
communications. NB-IoT features include e.g. extended coverage and deep
penetration for massive connectivity, longer battery-life, appropriate
throughput and desired latency at lower bandwidth. Regarding the device
energy consumption, NB-IoT is mostly under-estimated for its control and
signaling overheads, which calls for a better understanding of the
energy consumption profiling of an NB-IoT radio transceiver. With this
aim, this work presents a thorough investigation of the energy
consumption profiling of Radio Resource Control (RRC) communication
protocol between an NB-IoT radio transceiver and a cellular
base-station. Using two different commercial off the shelf NB-IoT boards
and two Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) NB-IoT test networks operational
at Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, we propose an empirical
baseline energy consumption model. Based on comprehensive analyses of
the profile traces from the widely used BG96 NB-IoT module operating in
various states of RRC protocol, our results indicate that the proposed
model accurately depicts the baseline energy consumption of an NB-IoT
radio transceiver while operating at different coverage class levels.
The evaluation errors for our proposed model vary between 0.33% and
15.38%.