An adaptive centralized authentication control method to reduce association delay in the IoT 802.11ah protocol.

The 802.11ah standard is a new energy-efficient, wireless networking protocol which allows thousands of indoor and outdoor devices to be connected to the same access point. The Centralized Authentication Control (CAC) method, described in the standard, enables up to 8000 stations to be authenticated and associated with the same access point. A baseline implementation of the CAC method has been reported; however, it suffers from a few limitations. In this paper, an efficient methodology is proposed to minimize the CAC method's association time. The proposed methodology allows the association of a large number of stations by predicting the size of the network followed by selecting the best step size that will enable fast association between the access point and the stations of the network. The methodology consists of three stages. The first stage provides a baseline implementation of the 802.11ah standard, while the second stage eliminates the effect of too large or too small step sizes. The third stage finds the optimal step size and step repeat for each network size and predicts network size based on queue size. The performance of the proposed methodology is evaluated and compared in terms of total association time, number of total trials and percentage of ineffective trials. The methodology outperforms the baseline implementation by achieving a 30% reduction in the total association time, 30% reduction in the total number of trials and 45% reduction in the total number of ineffective trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]