Hybrid MAC mechanism for energy efficient communication in IEEE 802.11ah
Luca Beltramelli, Patrik Österberg, Ulf Jennehag, Mikael Gidlund · 2017
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 of the proposed mechanism and of IEEE 802.11ah. The results show that for a monitoring scenario, the proposed contentionreservation mechanism reduces the energy consumption for a successful uplink data transmission by up to 55%.