Title: System-level analysis of IEEE 802.11ah technology for unsaturated MTC traffic

Authors: Aleksandr Ometov; Nader Daneshfar; Ali Hazmi; Sergey Andreev; Luis Felipe Del Carpio; Parth Amin; Johan Torsner; Yevgeni Koucheryavy; Mikko Valkama

Addresses: Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu 10, Tampere, FI-33720, Finland ' Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu 10, Tampere, FI-33720, Finland ' Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu 10, Tampere, FI-33720, Finland ' Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu 10, Tampere, FI-33720, Finland ' Ericsson Research, Jorvas, FI-02420, Finland ' Ericsson Research, Jorvas, FI-02420, Finland ' Ericsson Research, Jorvas, FI-02420, Finland ' Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu 10, Tampere, FI-33720, Finland ' Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu 10, Tampere, FI-33720, Finland

Abstract: Enabling the Internet of Things, machine-type communications (MTC) is a next big thing in wireless innovation. In this work, we concentrate on the attractive benefits offered by the emerging IEEE 802.11ah technology to support a large number of MTC devices with extended communication ranges. We begin with a comprehensive overview of the novel features introduced by the latest IEEE 802.11ah specifications followed by the development of a powerful mathematical framework capturing the essential properties of a massive MTC deployment with unsaturated traffic patterns. Further, we compare our analytical findings for a characteristic MTC scenario against respective system-level simulations across a number of important performance indicators. Our analytical results provide adequate performance predictions even when simulations are challenged by the excessive computational complexity. In addition, we study the novel IEEE 802.11ah mechanisms offering improved support for massive device populations and conclude on their expected performance.

Keywords: IEEE 802.11ah; analytical modelling; simulations; MTC/M2M; unsaturated traffic; throughput; delay; power consumption.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2018.090480

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2018 Vol.26 No.4, pp.269 - 282

Received: 11 May 2016
Accepted: 22 Nov 2016
Published online: 19 Mar 2018 *

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