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

Authors

Mouhamed Abdulla, Sheridan CollegeFollow
Zohreh Motamedi, Sheridan College
Alvin Ramoutar, Sheridan College

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

2021

Keywords

LPWAN, cellular IoT, latency, QoE, smart cities, vehicular and wireless technologies, quality of service, benchmark testing, density functional theory

Abstract

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.

Comments

From proceedings of Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2021-Fall), 2021 IEEE 94th.

Faculty

Faculty of Applied Science & Technology (FAST)

Journal

2021 IEEE 94th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2021-Fall)

First Page

1

Last Page

6

Version

Pre-print

Peer Reviewed/Refereed Publication

yes

Copyright

© Mouhamed Abdulla, Zohreh Motamedi & Alvin Ramoutar, 2021

Terms of Use

http://source.sheridancollege.ca/termsofuse.html”>Terms of Use for Works posted in SOURCE.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Original Publication Citation

A. Ramoutar, Z. Motamedi and M. Abdulla, "Latency of Concatenating Unlicensed LPWAN with Cellular IoT: An Experimental QoE Study," 2021 IEEE 94th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2021-Fall), 2021, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/VTC2021-Fall52928.2021.9625483.

SOURCE Citation

Abdulla, Mouhamed; Motamedi, Zohreh; and Ramoutar, Alvin, "Latency of Concatenating Unlicensed LPWAN with Cellular IoT: An Experimental QoE Study" (2021). Publications and Scholarship. 78.
https://source.sheridancollege.ca/fast_publications/78