Multi-Criterion Decision Making for Wireless Communication Technologies Adoption in IoT

Introduction

In this era of technological advancement, we are facing massive disruption in all domains of our existing Industrial setup. Lampropoulos et al. (2019) explored that there is a lot of quest for the changes next industrial revolution, Industry 4.0 is going to have on our current state of practice. The most significant change that we have already started facing is role of internet and omnipresence of human reach due to it. Internet of Things (IoT) has started expanding its wings in all spheres of Human Technological progression. There has been a wide acceptance of IoT driven technology in the recent past, as instanced by Alam (2018), there will be 75.44 billion connected devices by the year 2021. The internet has expanded its wings and is now collaborating with data science and artificial intelligence to make our machines even smarter and talking to us all the time. It is a new era of thinking about smart machines and smarter technologies. The world is changing the dimensions of communication through use of IoT and smarter technologies. There are various wireless technologies available for communication in IoT and even newer technologies are evolving with changing needs of the market. Each of the technology has inherent advantages and limitations. There are various factors that impact the use of one technology over the other in terms of security, availability, applicability, reliability etc. It becomes a very complex task to take a decision on adoption of one technology over other as all technologies are competing with each other on their specific advantages to support the applications. In this paper the authors have presented a multi criterion decision making approach based on Hasse diagrams presented by Mao (2010) and Voigt et al. (2006), absolute reference discussed in research work of Keller et al. (1991), Hendriks et al. (1992) and average ranking techniques explored by Lewis et al. (1992) to select the best Wireless Communication Technology (WCT) from available options. This approach may be very instrumental for taking into account the impact of each of the contributing factors for choosing the right technology.