IEEE 802.11ah-Enabled Internet of Drone Architecture

IEEE 802.11ah is considered as a promising and scalable solution for connecting a large number of drones. With the support of sub-1 GHz channel bands, relay, and a group-based channel access mechanism, 802.11ah can help drone stations to collect commands, send data, and process response to the control room. However, achieving the required throughput and latency is still challenging due to high mobility and dynamic relaying requirement. This article proposes an IEEE 802.11ah-based Internet of Drones (IoD) architecture for surveillance and remote control. It proposes a scheme for an access point to predict the location of a drone station, and transmitting the required association and channel access configuration to it, enabling it to take up the role of relay. Relay nodes use the transmission opportunity with implicit Acknowledgment to increase the efficiency of the network. The performance analysis of the proposed architecture shows significant improvement in terms of throughput and latency.