A Practical TDMA Modification of IEEE 802.11 for Ultra-Dense IoT-Health with Fairness Considerations

Over the last decades, wireless networks have experienced major growth in their enabling technologies and global penetration, with the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm witnessing a significant growth. To meet the high connectivity demands, the IEEE 802.11 WiFi protocol is constantly evolving, yet performance bottlenecks still exist especially in ultra-dense network scenarios requiring crowd sensing and management, where health monitoring and safety are of utmost importance. In this paper, we propose a practical approach that is compliant with the IEEE 802.11 standard to accommodate periodic IoT traffic in scenarios with a very large number of users and critical delay-sensitive health application data. The proposed approach combines data-control channel separation with optimized time division multiple access~(TDMA), including an extension to maintain a level of fairness among different devices. The proposed approach is shown to achieve notable gains in packet delivery ratio, delay, and number of associated and served users compared to the CSMA/CA-based IEEE 802.11 WiFi standards.