In this work, we resort to computer simulations to compare the coverage of long range (LoRa) and narrowband (NB)-IoT in two different realistic scenarios of southern Brazil, encompassing an overall area of 8182.6 km². The first scenario is predominantly rural with a few base stations (BSs) while the other scenario corresponds to a mostly urban area with high density of BSs. Our analysis, which adopts the actual position and parameters of the BSs of a given operator, also takes into account the digital elevation model (DEM) of the environments in order to calculate the path loss, following a realistic propagation model from 3GPP. Our results indicate that for a mainly rural environment, when operating at a similar sub-GHz frequency band, NB-IoT outperforms LoRa due to the directivity associate with directional antennas which provide a better coverage for devices which are far from BS but near the main beam. However, LoRa presents a better coverage, regardless of the site deployment, when the NB-IoT is considered to operate in the 1900-MHz band.

在这项工作中，我们借助计算机模拟来比较巴西南部的两种不同现实情况下的远程（LoRa）和窄带（NB）-IoT的覆盖范围，总面积为8182.6 km ²。第一种情况主要是农村地区，有几个基站（BS），而另一种情况则是大部分城市地区的BS密度很高。我们的分析采用了给定运营商的BS的实际位置和参数，并且根据3GPP的实际传播模型，还考虑了环境的数字高程模型（DEM）以计算路径损耗。我们的结果表明，在主要的农村环境中，当以类似的GHz以下频段运行时，NB-IoT的性能优于LoRa，这是因为与定向天线相关的方向性可以为远离BS但靠近主天线的设备提供更好的覆盖光束。但是，当NB-IoT被认为在1900 MHz频段运行时，无论站点部署在哪里，LoRa都会提供更好的覆盖范围。