The Study of the Centralized Control Method to Hasten Link Set-up in IEEE 802.11ah Networks

In many emerging scenarios, a group of mobile gadgets and autonomous devices are simultaneously connecting to a network. When the group is large, setting up the links - which includes authentication and association handshakes - can take ages because of extremely high contention. In the paper, we study how an Access Point (AP) can hasten these handshakes in the next generation Wi-Fi networks. In particular, we focus on the centralized authentication control (CAC) method recently introduced in IEEE 802.11ah. To adaptively manage CAC parameters and improve its efficiency, we develop algorithms based on analytical and heuristic approaches. Apart from that, we propose a scheme allowing the AP to reduce contention during the link set-up, even in the network with legacy stations. With extensive simulation, we show that our solutions decrease the link set-up time by orders of magnitude.