A station regrouping method for contention based IEEE 802.11ah wireless LAN
Ziming Zhu, Zhenzhe Zhong, Zhong Fan · 2017
The enhancement of wireless technologies for machine-type communications and the Internet of things attracts the attention of recent communications research. The IEEE 802.11 task group TGah proposes to use group-based contention scheme in the MAC of its proposed amendment 11ah in order to cope with massive power constrained stations (STAs) per access point (AP). However the detailed regrouping technique is described as implementation specific. In this paper, we propose a novel method consisting of a signalling process and a regrouping algorithm. The aim of the regrouping is to minimise the potential transmission collisions caused by the hidden node problem. Firstly, the AP acquires knowledge of potential hidden node pairs and the traffic requirement of the STAs in the network. The AP then regroup the STAs into different contention groups according to either a centralised Viterbi-like algorithm or a decentralised iterative updating manner. The proposed technique can also be used in other contention based wireless networks where grouping is supported in the MAC protocol. System level simulation results show superior performance of the proposed technique in terms of the reduction in collision.