*5.5. Discussions*

In Table 7 we have summarized some of the performances of various schemes from the literature related to reliability of LoRaWAN networks. Even though there is a huge gap between these papers and ours, we did our best to compare the performance levels with the ones achieved in this work.

In particular, the achieved reliability values are reported with the corresponding number of nodes used in the simulations. As mentioned in Section 2, the closely paper to ours is [6] which provides significant results in terms of reliability with the accommodation of nearly 2000 users. However, this scheme doesn't provide any specific solution to address the problem of urgen<sup>t</sup> traffic delivery, i.e., the latency problem is not specifically addressed. As a matter of fact, the authors just speculate that the proposed solution can handle urgen<sup>t</sup> traffic if the number of EDs is small without actually simulating this scenario. Moreover, the nodes are considered to be fixed so that it is possible to design a fixed frequency/time scheduling procedure in which all the nodes are perfectly synchronized with the GW, a situation which is not verified in the FMAR time varying scenario considered in our paper. Finally, the solution provided in [6,7] deviates from standard LoRaWAN and requires modification of the MAC layer. To sum up, the results obtained through our scheme not only validate the proposed algorithm but also provide important intuitions in enabling a real FMAR scenario where both reliability and latency requirements are very critical.

**Table 7.** Performance comparison with other works from the literature.

