Energy-aware Restricted Access Window control with retransmission scheme for IEEE 802.11ah (Wi-Fi HaLow) based networks

Abstract

Restricted Access Window (RAW) has been introduced to IEEE 802.11ah MAC layer to decrease collision probability. However, the inappropriate application of RAW for different groups of devices would increase uplink energy consumption and decrease data rate. In this paper, we study an energy efficient RAW optimization problem for IEEE 802.11ah based uplink communications. We first present a novel retransmission scheme that utilizes the next empty slot to retransmit for collided devices, and formulate the problem based on overall energy consumption and the data rate of each RAW by applying probability theory and Markov Chain. Then, we derive the energy efficiency of the uplink transmission. Last but not the least, an energy-aware window control algorithm to adapt the RAW size is proposed to optimize the energy efficiency by identifying the number of slots in each RAW for different group scales. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms existing RAW on uplink energy efficiency and delivery ratio.