QoS Management and Performance Evaluation of LoRaWAN Using IEEE 2668 With Fuzzification

The emerging of LoRaWAN creates huge benefits for various IoT applications in consumer markets, given its advantages of long range and low power consumption. Generally, different applications have different quality of service (QoS) requirements (e.g., PLR, latency, etc.). The diversity of QoS requirements makes it difficult to comprehensively and uniformly evaluate LoRaWAN performance. Additionally, the conventional QoS metrics do not directly reflect the users satisfaction for the specific application. To address these challenges, the Satisfaction IoT Index (SDex) based on the IEEE 2668 standard is proposed to evaluate LoRaWAN performance comprehensively and uniformly. Based on defined QoS metrics (i.e., PLR, latency, energy consumption, and coverage efficiency), SDex is established as a user-centric index to evaluate the users satisfaction degree for the specific application by measuring difference between practical and required performances. Besides, SDex-based fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (SDex-FCE) scheme is developed to grade the SDex score taking attribution uncertainty at adjacent levels into consideration. Finally, the best LoRaWAN configuration solution can be identified as the one with the highest SDex score. Experiments for case studies (i.e., smart metering and smart healthcare) are performed to illustrate the effectiveness of SDex and provide guidance for developers to choose the best LoRaWAN configuration solution. © 2024 IEEE.