Energy efficient channel access mechanism for IEEE 802.11ah based networks

IEEE 802.11ah is designed to support battery powered devices that are required to serve for several years in the Internet of Things networks. The Restricted Access Window (RAW) has been introduced in IEEE 802.11ah to address the scalability of thousands of densely deployed devices. As the RAW sizes entail the consumed energy to support the transmitting devices in the network, hence the control mechanism for RAW should be carefully devised for improving the overall energy e ciency of IEEE 802.11ah. This thesis presents a two-stage adaptive RAW scheme for IEEE 802.11ah to optimise the energy efficiency of massive channel access and transmission in the uplink communications for highly dense networks. The proposed scheme adaptively controls the RAW sizes and device transmission access by taking into account the number of devices per RAW, retransmission mechanism, harvested-energy and prioritised access. The scheme has four completely novel control blocks: RAW size control that adaptively adjusts the RAW sizes according to different number of devices and application types in the networks. RAW retransmission control that improves the channel utilisation by retransmitting the collided packets at the subsequent slot in the same RAW. Harvested-energy powered access control that adjusts the RAW sizes with the consideration of the uncertain amount of harvested-energy in each device and channel conditions. Priority-aware channel access control that reduces the collisions of high-priority packets in the time-critical networks. The performance of the proposed controls is evaluated in Matlab under different net work scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed controls improve the network performances in terms of energy efficiency, packet delivery ratio and delay as compared to the existing window control.