Comparison of 802.11ah and BLE for a home automation use case

IEEE 802.11ah and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) are candidates to become key technologies for many Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In this paper, 802.11ah and BLE technologies are evaluated and compared in a home automation scenario. The selected use case includes battery powered sensors, which generate traffic, and mains powered actuators, which consume traffic, connected through a central gateway. The performance is assessed in terms of service ratio, delay and activity factor of the transceivers. Results show that both technologies are suitable for the reference use case scenario. 802.11ah benefits from a higher throughput and lower delay jitter, whereas BLE sensors show lower activity factors and a longer battery lifetime is expected. The analysis is conducted for both fixed and variable traffic load. The performance of BLE results to be more sensitive to an increase of the traffic load with respect to 802.11ah. Eventually, the limitations of the current scenario are illustrated and alternative setups are discussed.

[1]  Piergiuseppe Di Marco,et al.  Coverage analysis of Bluetooth low energy and IEEE 802.11ah for office scenario , 2015, 2015 IEEE 26th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC).

[2]  Sunghyun Choi,et al.  IEEE 802.11ah: A Long Range 802.11 WLAN at Sub 1 GHz , 2013, J. ICT Stand..

[3]  J.-E. Berg,et al.  Propagation models, cell planning and channel allocation for indoor applications of cellular systems , 1993, IEEE 43rd Vehicular Technology Conference.

[4]  Rüdiger Kays,et al.  Performance Evaluation of Wireless Home Automation Networks in Indoor Scenarios , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid.

[5]  Ali Hazmi,et al.  Feasibility study of IΕΕΕ 802.11ah radio technology for IoT and M2M use cases , 2012, 2012 IEEE Globecom Workshops.

[6]  Behnam Badihi,et al.  Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.11ah Actuators , 2016, 2016 IEEE 83rd Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring).

[7]  Mohamed H. Elgazzar Perspectives on M2M protocols , 2015, 2015 IEEE Seventh International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Information Systems (ICICIS).

[8]  Hao Xu,et al.  An overview of 3GPP enhancements on machine to machine communications , 2016, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[9]  Joshua R. Smith,et al.  Power consumption analysis of Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee and ANT sensor nodes in a cyclic sleep scenario , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Wireless Symposium (IWS).