Achieving Fairness in IEEE 802.11ah Networks for IoT Applications with Different Requirements

The IEEE 802.11ah standard can provide cost-effective Internet access to a large number of devices in newly evolving Internet-of-Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine (M2M) networks. To handle high collision probability caused by a large number of devices, it adopts a group-based protocol at the MAC layer and divides nodes (or sensors) into a number of groups. The formed groups may not be uniform in terms of data rate requirements, since each group is a combination of sensors with different traffic characteristics. To achieve fair resource utilization across the groups which in turn maximizes the channel utilization, this paper formulates fair grouping in IEEE 802.11ah networks as an optimization problem, and we develop a heuristic method to solve the problem in real-time. In addition, to ensure fair channel utilization by the nodes in each group, a contention window selection and adjustment method is proposed. Results from extensive simulations conducted in a dense IoT network show that the proposed fairness model achieves a superior performance than the existing methods in terms of throughput, packet delay, energy efficiency, and fairness.