Periodic Traffic Scheduling for IEEE 802.11ah Networks

In this letter, we propose a novel channel access mechanism for IEEE 802.11ah to reduce delay and energy consumption in large-scale networks. The proposed protocol predicts the service interval of a monitoring application and schedules the subsequent frames before their arrivals without requiring any further contention. By doing so, the proposed protocol significantly reduces access delay and unnecessary wake-ups. In saturated network conditions, the proposed protocol shows throughput improvement up to 25%, and reduces average packet latency and energy consumption up to 55.5% and 48.4% respectively as compared to the traditional scheme.