Improving efficiency of heterogeneous Wi-Fi networks with joint usage of TIM segmentation and restricted access window

In order to meet the rising demands for the Internet of Things technologies, Wi-Fi community has developed Wi-Fi HaLow. It extends Wi-Fi with new functionality supporting high number of autonomous devices with various power capabilities and traffic patterns. In the paper, we study the cooperation of such new mechanisms as TIM Segmentation and Restricted Access Window. TIM Segmentation reduces energy consumption for low-power devices retrieving data from the Access Point, while Restricted Access Window reduces contention and allows the Access Point to protect stations with different capabilities from interfering each other. We consider joint usage of these mechanisms in a heterogeneous network with a high number of low-power stations with rare traffic and several powered stations with saturated traffic. Specifically, for TIM Segmentation and Restricted Access Window we develop a simple and fairly accurate mathematical method to set up the parameters of the mechanisms in order to improve performance for both types of stations, i.e. to reduce power consumption for low-power stations and to increase throughput for the other ones.