A First Look at Energy Consumption of NB-IoT in the Wild: Tools and Large-Scale Measurement

Recent years have seen a widespread deployment of NB-IoT networks for massive machine-to-machine communication in the emerging 5G era. Unfortunately, the key aspects of NB-IoT networks, such as radio access performance and power consumption have not been well-understood due to lack of effective tools and closed nature of operational cellular infrastructure. In this paper, we develop NB-Scope - the first hardware NB-IoT diagnostic tool that supports fine-grained fusion of power and protocol traces. We then conduct a large-scale field measurement study consisting of 30 nodes deployed at over 1,200 locations in 4 regions during a period of three months. Our in-depth analysis of the collected 49 GB traces showed that NB-IoT nodes yield significantly imbalanced energy consumption in the wild, up to a ratio of 75:1, which may lead to short battery lifetime and frequent network partition. Such a high performance variance can be attributed to several key factors including diverse network coverage levels, long tail power profile, and excessive control message repetitions. We then explore the optimization of NB-IoT base station settings on a software-defined eNodeB testbed, and suggest several important design aspects that can be considered by future NB-IoT specifications and chipsets.