An empirical energy consumption analysis in a cattle geolocation device

Abstract

Geolocation is a feature that is highly sought after for agribusiness and for a wide variety of other applications, especially those related to the Internet of Things. It allows us to find our location, locate objects, manage vehicle fleets, or track moving animals. This provides value to many industries as well as individual clients who can make good use of these features. GNSS technologies, such as GPS, offer an excellent solution for situations that require meter-level resolution and where stable access to a power source is available, such as in vehicles. However, many applications do not have this advantage. In such cases, it has often been dismissed due to its high energy consumption. This study empirically measures and analyzes GNSS consumption and proposes strategies to reduce it, including assisted geolocation. The challenge of developing GNSS-based geolocation applications has also been due to the energy required to transmit location data. Cellular technology has been deployed for decades to address this issue. For many years, cellular network development focused on high-capacity networks rather than low-capacity, energy-efficient networks, until the advent of LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Networks). These networks are designed for long-range coverage (5 to 10 km) and much lower energy consumption. This work presents various transmission consumption measurements, analyzing previous work on GPRS, as a legacy cellular technology, and LoRa, as one of the new non 3GPP LPWAN standards. It also explores the new NB-IoT (Narrow Band - Internet of Things) standard, which offers a low-consumption option for cellular applications. Several scenarios of power and bitrate measurements for NB- IoT are presented, analyzed, and compared to GPRS and LoRa. Based on this data, the entire process of geolocation applications is studied, including strategies to reduce consumption, a battery estimation methodology for devices used in this kind of application and a detailed battery calculation for cattle tracking and pet geolocation.