An Empirical Nb-Iot Power Consumption Model For Battery Lifetime Estimation

The NB-IoT radio technology is a key enabler of the wireless Internet of Things. A competitive parameter is device battery lifetime, in addition to wide-area coverage and low device cost. In this paper, we present the first publicly available empirical power consumption measurements on two NB-IoT devices. The target is to provide a power consumption model for Internet of Things battery lifetime estimation.The commercially available NB-IoT device is measured to consume 716mW when transmitting at 23 dBm, due to a power amplifier efficiency of 37%. Receiving control and data channels require 213mW, while the Idle-mode extended Discontinuous Reception and Power Save Mode sleep states consume 21mWand 13 mu W, respectively. In general, the power consumption levels are slightly higher than the 3GPP estimates, however the resulting estimated battery lifetime is promising, for this first generation device, being just 10% shorter than the original 3GPP estimates.