Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.11ah Actuators
Behnam Badihi, Luis Felipe Del Carpio, Parth Amin, Anna Larmo, Miguel M. Lopez, Dee Denteneer · 2016
We analyze the performance of IEEE 802.11ah technology in an actuation use case for connected lighting from the perspective of latency and power consumption at the actuator in the downlink direction. The study includes network configurations with different beacon frame transmission intervals, channel bandwidths, group of stations in power-save mode as well as unicast-multicast transmissions using different modulation and coding schemes. The results show the existing trade off between the desired latency and power consumption at the actuator station as shorter beacon frame intervals are required to achieve lower latency. A system deployed using 2 MHz of channel bandwidth leads to lower transmission delays and power consumption compared to a 1 MHz system. Also, the study shows how grouping based on transmission indication map further affects latency and power consumption. Furthermore, addressing each actuator with a unicast transmission from the wireless access point limits the number of supported actuators and good latency performance is obtained when groups of actuators are commanded together utilizing broadcast-multicast transmissions with appropriate choice of modulation and coding scheme.