Traffic-Aware Sensor Grouping for IEEE 802.11ah Networks: Regression Based Analysis and Design

Traditional IEEE 802.11 network is designed for the use of small scale local wireless networks. However, the emergence of the Internet of Things (loT) has changed the scene of wireless communications. Thus, recently, the IEEE task group ah (TGah) has been dedicated to the standardization of a new protocol, called IEEE 802.11ah, which is customized for this type of large-scale networks. IEEE 802.11ah adopts a grouping-based MAC protocol to reduce the contention overhead for each group of devices. However, most existing designs simply randomly partition devices into groups, and less attention has been paid to the problem of forming efficient groups. Therefore, in this paper, we argue that the performance of grouping is closely related to heterogeneity in traffic demands of devices, and propose a traffic-aware grouping algorithm to improve channel utilization. Since channel utilization of a group closely depends on the collision probability, we further derive a regression-based analytical model to estimate the contention success probability with consideration of sensors' heterogeneous traffic demands. The evaluation via NS-3 simulations shows that the proposed regression-based model is quite accurate even when clients have diverse traffic demands, and our traffic-aware grouping outperforms other baseline approaches, especially when the network is nearly saturated.