Evaluation of Cellular IoT Technologies for Critical Applications

The world is experiencing a new wave of connected devices that can measure temperature, humidity, water levels, etc., and the volume of these devices is increasing exponentially over time. The concept of Internet of Things (IoT) existed for several years, but in recent years, the introduction of Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies has expanded its scope of applications in several other verticals. Now the use of IoT devices can be found in industrial automation applications, utilities, smart cities, smart communities, transportation, etc. One vertical that can benefit from using the new generation of LPWAN technologies is remote healthcare. This thesis validates the use of Cellular Internet of Things (C­IoT) technologies for building an End­to­End (E2E) critical application that is expected to perform continuous remote monitoring of chronically ill Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) patients. The project follows Participatory Design methodology to design an IoT end device that is capable of performing continuous measurement of Electrocardiogram (ECG) and Heart Rate (HR). The device can then send that data to a remote data collection, storage, and visualization system using C­IoT technologies. The efforts in evaluating the KPI performance of the C­IoT technologies involved performing an experimental evaluation of network Key Performance Indicator (KPI) such as E2E latency, bitrate, and Packet Drop (PD) in several physical environments. The experiments were performed in indoor, deep­indoor, outdoor, remote­outdoor, and network roaming environments. The project further goes on to evaluate the C­IoT per cell capacity and the power consumption recorded using different C­IoT modules to understand the wholistic picture of the state of C­IoT network deployed by Denmark’s two biggest MNO. The outcome of the experimental evaluation of C­IoT networks in various conditions perform differently. There have been noticeable KPI performance dissimilarities in the different MNO within the country and in the Nordic region. The Radio Access Network (RAN) parameter settings can affect the capacity of the number of devices that can perform continuous data transmission as well the RAN settings can affect the power consumption of the C­IoT devices. The experiment also resulted in testing C­IoT devices in an outage scenario and discovered the poor performance capabilities of these devices to maintain connectivity in outage situations. This highlights the limitation of using a single frequency band to deploy the C­IoT network. Identification of gaps in the current C­IoT deployments led to using different techniques such as Multiple Radio Access Technology (Multi­RAT) and Device­TO­Device (D2D) communication to avoid complete loss of connectivity of IoT devices. During the project, a new prototype was developed that could combine these two approaches to enable more reliable and robust communication between the IoT device and a remote server. The results from the experimental testing of C­IoT indicate that the technologies are not fully matured yet to support the deployment of critical IoT applications requiring continuous remote monitoring. Perhaps there is a need for a substandard that can allow these technologies to support continuous critical monitoring applications such as telemedicine and telemonitoring.