SUMMARY
Wireless sensor networks as an emerging technology have garnered a lot of attention recently. With the development of wireless sensor networks, some problems such as data delay, information loss, and others have gradually appeared. In order to cope with these problems, evaluating the service quality in wireless sensor networks is crucial. However, how to evaluate the service quality in wireless sensor networks and especially how to accurately portray the preferences of a decision maker exactly are often difficult. To deal with this challenge, firstly, an evaluation system of attributes related to the service quality in wireless sensor networks is constructed based on the existing studies. Then, the probabilistic linguistic method including the definition of probabilistic linguistic term sets, the operators of probabilistic linguistic term sets, and the ranking order of probabilistic linguistic term sets are introduced. Probabilistic term sets used to denote the preferences of a decision maker are considered as more appropriate expressions than classical linguistic term sets, 2-tuple linguistic term sets, and portion linguistic term sets in the process of evaluating the service quality in wireless sensor networks. Finally, the probabilistic linguistic method is applied in the constructed service quality in wireless sensor networks so as to demonstrate its validity and applicability and further to help the decision maker find the problems in the service quality in wireless sensor networks and improve them.