A Smart Wireless Paging Sensor Network for Elderly Care Application Using LoRaWAN

Long range wide area network (LoRaWAN) is increasingly gained much attention due to its advantages in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) application. The message delivery between participated nodes and gateway in the WSNs affects the quality of service (QoS) such as energy consumption and the successful delivery rate (SDR). In this paper, we present a novel packet transmission model for a smart wireless paging sensor network (WPSN) based on LoRaWAN, which supports a real-time elderly care application. The model is used to investigate the performance of star topology communication on elderly care via Markov discrete-time M/M/1 queuing system. The proposed traffic model enables the performance evaluation of WPSN for elderly care. Moreover, an optimal cluster allocation policy is proposed by which maximizing SDR are obtained and QoS constraint requirements are met in terms of energy consumption. We conduct analytic analysis and simulation to exploit the QoS of LoRa-based WSNs for elderly care application. The proposed WPSN is experimental studied and validated in a real elder care scenario. The contributions presented in this paper may be referenced in the design of LoRa-based WPSN.