Latency of Concatenating Unlicensed LPWAN with Cellular IoT: An Experimental QoE Study

Developing low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) solutions that are efficient to adopt, deploy and maintain are vital for smart cities. The poor quality-of-service of unlicensed LPWAN, and the high service cost of LTE-M/NB-IoT are key disadvantages of these technologies. Concatenating unlicensed with licensed LPWANs can overcome these limitations and harness their benefits. However, a concatenated LPWAN architecture will inevitably result in excess latency which may impact users’ quality-of-experience (QoE). To evaluate the real-life feasibility of this system, we first propose a concatenated LPWAN architecture and experimentally measure the statistics of end-to-end (E2E) latencies. The concatenated delay margin is determined by benchmarking the latencies with different LPWAN architecture schemes, namely with unlicensed IoT (standalone LoRa), cellular IoT (standalone LTE-M), and concatenated IoT (LoRa interfaced with LTE-M). Through extensive experimental measurement campaigns of 30,000 data points of E2E latencies, we show that the excess delay due to LPWAN interfacing introduces on average less than 300 milliseconds. With a users’ QoE satisfaction of 95%, we also found that concatenated LPWAN outperforms unlicensed IoT by roughly 1.5 s. Overall, the result suggests that a concatenated LPWAN is technically feasible and offers an affordable alternative for real-world smart city deployment

Campus Navigator - FAST Capstone Project

Sheridan Software Network Development and Engineering (SDNE) Captstone Campus Navigator app created by Alvin Ramoutar, Jennifer To, Pavan Kuntumalla, Anish Jagadisan. Presented on SRCA Digital Wall, hosted by Sheridan Library and Learning Services. 2019 Best SDNE Capstone.https://source.sheridancollege.ca/library_exhibits_digital_wall/1000/thumbnail.jp