Dissecting Energy Consumption of NB-IoT Devices Empirically

3GPP has recently introduced NB-IoT, a new mobile communication standard offering a robust and energy-efficient connectivity option to the rapidly expanding market of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. To unleash its full potential, end devices are expected to work in a plug-and-play fashion, with zero or minimal configuration of parameters, still exhibiting excellent energy efficiency. We performed the most comprehensive set of empirical measurements with commercial IoT devices and different operators to date, quantifying the impact of several parameters to energy consumption. Our findings prove that parameters' settings do impact energy consumption, so proper configuration is necessary. We shed light on this aspect by first illustrating how the nominal standard operational modes map into real current consumption patterns of NB-IoT devices. Furthermore, we investigated which device-reported metadata metrics better reflected performance and implemented an algorithm to automatically identify device state in the current time-series logs. We worked with two major western European operators to provide a measurement-driven analysis of energy consumption and network performance of two popular NB-IoT boards under different parameter configurations. We observed that energy consumption is mostly affected by the paging interval in connected state, set by the base station. However, not all operators correctly implement such settings. Furthermore, under the default configuration, energy consumption in not strongly affected by packet size nor by signal quality, unless it is extremely bad. Our observations indicate that simple modifications to the default parameters' settings can yield great energy savings.