Evaluating NB-IoT and Sigfox for Energy-Efficient Data Loggers in Sewer Infrastructure

This work presents the design and evaluation of a low-power data logger for multi-sensor data acquisition, intended for deployment in urban sewage infrastructure. The system integrates IoT communication capabilities to interface with a smart city’s centralized data platform. Two LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) communication technologies-Narrowband IoT (NBIoT) and Sigfox/LoRa-are analyzed and compared in terms of power consumption, hardware cost, and data transmission performance. The results offer practical guidance for selecting the most suitable communication protocol based on application-specific constraints, such as message frequency, energy availability, and bidirectional communication requirements. Sigfox is selected for occasional alert messages, while NB-IoT is used for the daily bulk transmission of measurements.