Experimental Evaluation of Roaming Performance of Cellular IoT Networks

As the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices continues, more and more wireless technologies are getting introduced into the market. NarrowBand-IoT and Long-Term Evaluation Cat M1 (LTE-M) are two Low-Powered Wide Area Network (LPWAN) communication technologies introduced by 3GPP in release 13 of LTE. Some of the features supported by these Cellular-IoT (C-IoT) technologies include low power consumption, extended coverage, low cost of deployment, roaming between Mobile Network Operator's (MNO) networks, etc. This paper focuses on the experimental evaluation of NB-IoT and LTE-M networks in an international roaming scenario. The goal behind the experiments is to test and benchmark the performance of NB-IoT and LTE-M by calculating network Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as bitrate, end-to-end latency, and packet drop in a home and in roaming network scenarios. In order to perform the experiments, a Danish operator is chosen with nationwide coverage in Denmark (DK), Sweden (SE), and Norway (NO). A total of 6000 packets with varying payload sizes are sent using both the C-IoT technologies in all three countries combined. The idea behind the experiments is to test whether or not C-IoT technologies are reliable for supporting roaming applications in the IoT paradigm.