Throughput Analytical Modeling of IEEE 802.11ah Wireless Networks

This paper presents a discrete-time Markov model for the operation of a station in a single-hop IEEE 802.11ah network under saturated traffic and ideal channel conditions. In the proposed model, each beacon interval has only one RAW group that is further divided into a number of RAW slots to which stations are evenly assigned with equal priority. A novel feature in the model is the consideration of the event of RAW slot completion time using a specific probability. Two empirical expressions for this probability are proposed, and we study the average aggregate throughput for various numbers of RAW slots and stations in the network. Numerical results derived from the analytical model show similar behavior to those obtained with an IEEE 802.11ah model available for the ns-3 simulator.