Time-Based Performance Analysis of Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) for Particulate Matter Monitoring System

One quality of a data communication system is supposed to consider the low latency delay time between a data sender and a receiver. Communication delays sometimes occur in a Narrowband Internet of things network (NB-IoT) between the end device (ED) and the cloud platform. The communication problem may be caused by packet loss or congestion in the system. Therefore, this paper measures transmission time between the ED and the cloud platform. The system was designed for the particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) monitoring system via the NB-IoT network. The system consists of the NB-IoT-based PM2.5 detector and real-time monitoring by the cloud platform. In the experiment, the test was conducted to document the data collection for 1 hour. The results showed that in the typical case, the transmission time between ED and cloud was an average of 2.01 seconds. However, in case of connection problems, the ED will retransmit until it succeeds, taking a maximum of 28.76 seconds Therefore, when configuring the period, it is necessary to consider transmission to minimize data loss, which is a limitation of communication. Namely, those problems will be solved and improved in future work to get higher performance with a low latency delay time of each round-trip time (RTT) of data communication.