Small-scale commercial rollouts of Cellular-IoT (C-IoT) networks have started globally since last year. However, among the plethora of low power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies, the cost-effectiveness of C-IoT is not certain for IoT service providers, small and greenfield operators. Today, there is no known public framework for the feasibility analysis of IoT communication technologies. Hence, this paper first presents a generic framework to assess the cost structure of cellular and non-cellular LPWAN technologies. Then, we applied the framework in eight deployment scenarios to analyze the prospect of LPWAN technologies like Sigfox, LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, LTE-M, and EC-GSM. We consider the inter-technology interference impact on LoRaWAN and Sigfox scalability. Our results validate that a large rollout with a single technology is not cost-efficient. Also, our analysis suggests the rollout possibility of an IoT communication Technology may not be linear to cost-efficiency.

自去年以来，蜂窝物联网 (C-IoT) 网络的小规模商业部署已在全球范围内启动。然而，在众多的低功耗广域网 (LPWAN) 技术中，C-IoT 的成本效益对于物联网服务提供商、小型和新建运营商来说并不确定。今天，还没有用于物联网通信技术可行性分析的已知公共框架。因此，本文首先提出了一个通用框架来评估蜂窝和非蜂窝 LPWAN 技术的成本结构。然后，我们将该框架应用于八个部署场景，分析了 Sigfox、LoRaWAN、NB-IoT、LTE-M 和 EC-GSM 等 LPWAN 技术的前景。我们考虑了技术间干扰对 LoRaWAN 和 Sigfox 可扩展性的影响。我们的结果证明，使用单一技术进行大规模部署并不划算。此外，我们的分析表明，物联网通信技术的推出可能性可能与成本效率不成线性关系。