DEARF: Delay and Energy Aware RAW Formation Scheme to Support Delay Sensitive M2M Traffic in IEEE 802.11ah Networks

The IEEE 802.11ah amendment is designed to support upto 8K M2M devices over the Sub-GHz channel. To achieve this, it introduces new modifications to the PHY and MAC layers. A dynamic Restricted Access Window~(RAW) mechanism is introduced at the MAC layer. RAW splits the access for different devices into small chunks of time. Using the RAW mechanism, we propose a novel Delay and Energy Aware RAW Formation (DEARF) scheme to support delay sensitive devices along with other delay tolerant devices. We exploit this to introduce four new RAWs. These new RAWs help split the access into contention free for delay sensitive devices and contention based for other devices. For scheduling resources between these devices, we give the DEARF resource allocation and evaluate the scheme with help of simulations. Devices suffer a higher delay but, at high loads, devices using the proposed scheme are able to save 30% energy per packet and upto 330% energy per device. Packet delivery ratio is 100% at low loads and 90% at high loads as compared to 95% and 27% given by the traditional access. Other delay tolerant devices save upto 16% on energy per packet transmitted and 23% on delay at high loads. Accepted in IEEE ANTS 2016