Factors Affecting the Performance of Sub-1 GHz IoT Wireless Networks

Internet of Things (IoT) devices frequently utilize wireless networks operating in the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) Sub-1 GHz spectrum bands. Compared with higher frequency bands, the Sub-1 GHz band provides broader coverage and lower power consumption, which are desirable properties for low-cost IoT applications. However, low-power and low-cost IoT modules cause high variability in network performance. The varying influence from real-world environments additionally undermines wireless propagation and aggravates this variability. We explore these influences and provide a checklist of potential factors affecting wireless network performance in real-world environments. Using multiple low-cost IoT modules, we conduct multiple experiments in five real-world scenarios: indoor, street, open field, ground-to-drone (G2D), and drone-to-drone (D2D). Specifically, the tests are conducted inside a building, on a straight street with wooded sidewalks and aligned houses, on an open field golf course, and high up in the air between drones. To understand the difficulty of reproducibility in IoT deployments, we studied the effect of factors in four categories. This includes the effect of path (line of sight, distance, and obstruction), configuration (transmit power level), weather (precipitation, temperature, and humidity), and installation (IoT module mobility and position). We find that some of the factors in the path and weather categories have the most influence among all the factors, while the rest have moderate to low impacts. In the end, we provide a complete checklist of all the tested factors, which we believe would be constructive not only to academics but also to industrial practitioners working on wireless IoT systems.