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 ofthe proposed mechanism and of IEEE 802.11ah. The results show that for a monitoring scenario, the proposed contention reservation mechanism reduces the energy consumption for a successful uplink data transmission by up to 55%.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Kommunikationssystem (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Communication Systems (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Telekommunikation (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Telecommunications (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datorteknik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Engineering (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Energy efficiency

IEEE 802.11ah

M2M communication

MAC protocol

RAW.

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)