Comparative study of the cost of implementing wireless technologies for IoT and M2M for the last mile: A case study

Abstract

The need to determine which wireless IoT technology, currently available on the market, will be able to support a sizeable simultaneous load of information, types of electrical emergency alarms, required bandwidths, delays-latency, area coverage, and economic cost to serve areas of 600 square kilometers of surface and several users of around two million homes. This article compares Sigfox, LoRa, NB-IoT, and WiMAX technologies as possible solutions for last-mile communications. For this purpose, a network of hundreds of smart meters has been simulated, each transmitting different types of information. In conclusion, it has been obtained that, for a context with the priority of alarms and a large amount of information transport in massive last-mile communications in smart grids and for electrical metering traffic, it is highly recommended that it be done through WiMAX, which in the evaluation shows the best result compared to the other technologies.