Hybrid MAC mechanism for energy efficient communication in IEEE 802.11ah

Many applications for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications are characterized by large numbers of devices with sporadic transmissions and subjected to low energy budgets. This work addresses the importance of energy consumption by proposing a new Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism for improving the energy efficiency of IEEE 802.11ah, a standard targeting M2M communication. We propose to use the features of IEEE 802.11ah MAC to realize a hybrid contention-reservation mechanism for the transmission of uplink traffic. In the proposed mechanism, any device with a buffered packet will first notify the Access Point (AP) during a contention phase before being given a reserved timeslot for the data transmission. We develop a mathematical model to analyse the energy consumption of the proposed mechanism and of IEEE 802.11ah. The results show that for a monitoring scenario, the proposed contentionreservation mechanism reduces the energy consumption for a successful uplink data transmission by up to 55%.

[1]  Masahiro Morikura,et al.  IEEE 802.11ah Based M2M Networks Employing Virtual Grouping and Power Saving Methods , 2013 .

[2]  Biplab Sikdar,et al.  A Survey of MAC Layer Issues and Protocols for Machine-to-Machine Communications , 2015, IEEE Internet of Things Journal.

[3]  Ren Ping Liu,et al.  WLAN Power Save with Offset Listen Interval for Machine-to-Machine Communications , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[4]  Jiming Chen,et al.  A scalable Hybrid MAC protocol for massive M2M networks , 2013, 2013 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC).

[5]  Evgeny M. Khorov,et al.  Modelling machine type communication in IEEE 802.11ah networks , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Communication Workshop (ICCW).

[6]  Saewoong Bahk,et al.  Regrouping algorithm to alleviate the hidden node problem in 802.11ah networks , 2016, Comput. Networks.

[7]  Tae-Jin Lee,et al.  Enhancement of IEEE 802.11ah MAC for M2M Communications , 2014, IEEE Communications Letters.

[8]  Jeroen Famaey,et al.  Evaluation of the IEEE 802.11ah Restricted Access Window mechanism for dense IoT networks , 2016, 2016 IEEE 17th International Symposium on A World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM).

[9]  Lei Zheng,et al.  Performance Analysis of Group-Synchronized DCF for Dense IEEE 802.11 Networks , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.