## 1 Introduction  
The Internet of Things (IoT) plays a crucial role in achieving connected living through increased business activities, remote operations, and social interactions. IoT technologies are more pronounced in urban areas through applications such as smart city, smart manufacturing, wearables, smart homes, self-driving cars, etc. These applications are driven by factors such as established business use cases, the availability of communication network resources and coverage, power and regulatory frameworks. These factors affect the rate of IoT penetration in rural localities, especially in developing countries where power and communication network coverage issues limit deployment opportunities and the realisation of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [1]. We believe that regions with limited terrestrial infrastructure will be best serviced by low Earth-orbiting (LEO) satellites and LPWAN-based IoT applications for services such as asset tracking and environmental monitoring, as these have the lowest demand for infrastructure. These approaches, however, may have drawbacks if two-way communication is not supported for communications between LEO satellites and ground-based IoT infrastructure. As the Internet of Everything (IoE) continues to evolve, so too do the protocols and challenges associated with its applications and deployment. Traditional wired and short-range wireless technologies cannot meet the scale of demand for the remote data visualisation of wireless sensor networks. Adopting LPWANs allows such scalability and ease of deployment, but with new challenges arising including security, power consumption, and latency. These were identified as some of the issues taken into account in the LPWAN deployment and applicability index towards best practice in LPWANs [2]. An adaptive battery-aware algorithm has been proposed to effectively manage power consumption and charging processes in medical IoT devices that remotely collect patients' data continuously [3]. The latency of data transmission in IoT networks are multi-faced at different parts of the network. The data payload size for typical IoT networks is typically of the order of a few bytes, partly because LoRaWAN has a payload size of 51 bytes [4]. To transmit a higher data payload without implementation packet fragmentation support, technologies such as NB-IoT can reduce the number of transmissions, latency and energy consumption that would arise from multiple transmissions in LoRaWAN. An analytical framework has been proposed to examine the effects of scheduling data, control information, and coverage classes on latency and battery lifetime in distributed IoT networks [5]. The proposed models minimised the communication delay with high-performance trade-offs in channel scheduling. LPWANs can be vulnerable to security attacks, but LoRaWAN and NB-IoT offer sufficient security for certain applications if implemented with strong security policies and enforcement [6]; moreover, in [7], we identified the current security challenges of different low-power wide area network (LPWAN) IoT networks and platforms as they apply to different IoT use cases. The integrity, confidentiality, authenticity, privacy, and trust of IoT systems are still open research issues. Similarly, in [8], we presented an early insight into the Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) testbed design and implementation procedure. In this paper, we evaluated the performance of licensed and unlicensed low-power wide area (LPWA) IoT network options to demonstrate the use of cellular LPWANs to meet the SDGs. NB-IoT and LoRaWAN are sustainable potential solutions for affordably connecting billions of IoT devices, and the technologies (GSM and LTE) upon which NB-IoT depends are available in developing countries. Both technologies are among the most popular ones in the research community for industrial and consumer applications.