Budget of IoT low power wide area network architectures

Abstract

In this thesis, we propose a model for the total budget of IoT LPWAN architectures to estimate their real economic and environmental costs. Based on a system engineering view of an IoT sensor node we provide a comprehensive model that estimates the total operational expenditure (OpEx) of generally any network of sensor nodes while taking into account the variation in technological parameters. We also show that non-radio components may interfere with network Quality of Service (QoS) and we provide verified theoretical framework for accurately predicting and controlling Internet of Things (IoT) node behavior. We provide an optimization model that is guaranteed to find least OpEx-expensive link assigned in an LPWAN IoT connected-star topology with heterogeneous End Device (ED) configurations. We also show that significant budget and environmental hazardous waste savings can be achieved through seemingly passive network changes such as introducing few gateways (GWs) or removing an unneeded timestamp from packet payload.